By shooting a laser beam of light
through a super-cooled glob of a
kind of optical molasses, Lene
Vestergaard Hau and her team at the
Rowland Institute for Science in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, were
able to slow the speed of light down
to just 38 miles per hour -- not even
fast enough for the slow lane of a
freeway.

By contrast, the normal speed of light in a vacuum is about 186,000 miles
per second -- 20 million times as fast.

"I would probably not call it God-like, but I would probably say ... we are
tampering with nature in a very peculiar, very bizarre way," Hau says.

The research, conducted at the
Rowland Institute and Harvard
University, was reported in
Thursday's issue of the journal
Nature.

The substance that slows the light,
called Bose-Einstein condensate, is a
microscopic glob of atoms slowed to
almost absolute zero -- 459.67
degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the
lowest temperature theoretically possible.

Researchers believe that it may be possible to slow the speed of light even
further, by a factor of 1,000.

"A human could move faster than that" says Stanford University's Steve
Harris, who participated in the project. "But a human couldn't move through
a Bose-Einstein condensate, I'll tell you that."

Researchers believe learning how to slow light could eventually have a
number of practical applications -- improving computers and
communications devices, making television displays and laser light shows
more vivid and creating better night-vision goggles.

-- Bill Delaney - 2/24/99