And this is believable for exactly what reason???

What the... this happened four years ago? WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED? Heads are going to roll, I tell you.

Hau, 41, a professor of physics at Harvard, admits that the famous genius would "probably be stunned" at the results of her experiments.

No. It is and was well known that light travels more slowly in a medium than in a vaccum.

"It's nifty to look into the chamber and see a clump of ultracold atoms floating there," Hau says. "In this odd state, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it."

She and her team continued to tweak their system until they finally brought light to a complete stop. The light dims as it slows down, so you think that it's being turned out. Then Hau shoots a yellow-orange laser beam into the cloud of atoms, and the light emerges at full speed and intensity.

Sweet! Are there any pictures?

Light travels at miles/second ratings depending on the medium. All that they have done is found a very extreme medium.

I thought absolute zero kelvin was only 459 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, while the sun's corona was several million degrees. Admittedly a bigger difference than say, the temperatures in Minnesota and Miami this time of year, but when the article starts talking about "a small cloud of atoms cooled to temperatures a billion times colder than those in the spaces between stars" I would like to know how they got things that cold to begin with, before I start wondering how that got light to travel below the minimum speed on most Interstate highways.

Still Bishop Ussher protested that the earth could not be that old...

No wonder it gets darker in my living room when I turn the thermostat down.

John -- The coldest space between the stars is at 4.3 degrees Kelvin (i.e. Centigrade degrees above absolute zero); and a billion times colder than that is a temperature of 4x10^(-9) Kelvin, i.e. 0.000000004 degrees Kelvin.

It's not easy to get things that cold, which is why it's taken a century to do this experiment. When I was a grad student in the late 80s, physicists were moving from milliKelvin to microKelvin temperatures.

When they get light to change speeds in a vacuum, call me. None of this is news.

Turtles, all the way down...

"The atom cloud was suspended magnetically in a chamber pumped down to a vacuum 100 trillion times lower than the pressure of air in the room where you are reading this." Since there is no complete vacuum in space either, how close do people want? Too bad they didn't give us the measurement in TOR. Seems like a vacuum to me....

Guy T.;

The effect used here was first postulated over 400 years ago, in 1678 and verified via experiment roughly 150 years later).

Peter V;

Remember that pressure is also a function of temperature, so the cloud was very far from vacuum despite the low pressure.

All;

I never thought I'd see someone trolling their own website. OJ clearly has not the slightest understanding of what he's posting on this subject and displays no hint of a desire to do so. He fails to respond substantively to any counter-point, instead replying with irrelevant clichés. The only purpose seems to be to abuse the community of commentators who reply in good faith. That's pretty much the definition of a troll.

Definition:
5. [v] angle with a hook and line drawn through the water

My only point is to demonstrate that such things are articles of faith and that folk don't question their own faith lest their world collapse.

Light doesn't travel at the same speed in glass as in a vacuum. This is simply an exaggeration of the phenomenon.

Mr. Judd;

What, exactly, is the thing you claim to be demonstrating is an article of faith? That c is invariant? If so, this article has absolutely nothing to do with that.

But if you're not trolling, answer one question "yes" or "no": If Einstein hadn't created his theory of relativity, would the GPS satellites have turned out to not need to be programmed to make relativistic corrections to their data?

No.