🚨 SHE SLOWED LIGHT TO JUST 38 MPH!
Light normally races through empty space at about 186,282 miles per second. But Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau found a way to make it move at roughly 38 miles per hour—about the speed of a bicycle.
The secret was an incredibly cold cloud of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Using lasers and temperatures extremely close to absolute zero, Hau’s team slowed a light pulse by about 20 million times.
But that was only the beginning.
Her team later managed to stop a light pulse completely, store its information, and restart it. They even demonstrated that light could be converted into a matter-based form, manipulated, and turned back into light.
It sounds like science fiction—but these experiments were real. They opened new possibilities for quantum information processing, optical communication, and advanced computing.
Sometimes, the fastest thing in the universe can be made to slow down… and even stop.
Source:
Hau, L. V., Harris, S. E., Dutton, Z., & Behroozi, C. H. (1999). Light speed reduction to 17 metres per second in an ultracold atomic gas. Nature, 397, 594–598.
ALT 🚨 SHE SLOWED LIGHT TO JUST 38 MPH!
Light normally races through empty space at about **186,282 miles per second**. But Danish physicist **Lene Vestergaard Hau** found a way to make it move at roughly **38 miles per hour**—about the speed of a bicycle.
The secret was an incredibly cold cloud of atoms called a **Bose-Einstein condensate**. Using lasers and temperatures extremely close to absolute zero, Hau’s team slowed a light pulse by about **20 million times**.
But that was only the beginning.
Her team later managed to **stop a light pulse completely, store its information, and restart it**. They even demonstrated that light could be converted into a matter-based form, manipulated, and turned back into light.