ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Daniel Harper]

On Thursday 05 April 2007 23:22, you wrote:
> Lawrence Bryan wrote
>
> > On Apr 5, 2007, at 6:56 AM, David Morris wrote:
> > >OK, so if one could travel AT the speed of light (the fastest speed
> > >possible), then experience, memory, consciousness would cease to be
> > >because time itself would stop, right?
> > >
> > >
> > > So here's a question that may or may not have meaning (I'm a complete
> > > novice with this stuff): Is it possible to REDUCE the speed one is
> > > traveling through this universal space? And if that were possible, I
> > > guess relative time (I guess relative to the expansion of space from
> > > the origin of the Big Bang?) would speed up? So if we knew the
> > > location of the origin of the Big Bang and started flying there at a
> > > speed close to that of light, our relative time would speed up?
> >
> > No, no, and no.
>
> does the fact that a person has slowed down light and stopped it in a lab
> affect one of those "nos"?  I'm guessing "no"...

No. Speed of light _in a vacuum_ is a constant, and is tied in with the very 
structure of the universe. Slowing down light is actually very simple, and 
involves simply placing it in some medium that will refract it -- the classic 
"broken pencil" due to parallax in a glass of water is an example of light 
moving more slowly through water than through air.

The importance of recent experiments in "slowing down" light (and this is 
something that is not very well covered in the news articles about it) is 
_how slow_ they've managed to make light go -- I think the current record is 
something like eleven inches a second or something like that. 

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com