I read somewhere that IBM has succeeded in slowing down light from its hitherto believed constant speed of 186,000 miles/sec. I guess science has sneaked past me in recent years. From what I learned in school, it would be tremendously huge news to do this and I hadn't heard squat about it until it was recently accomplished. It seems so odd.

 

got the link Lugnut?

this is beyond my understanding. i don't know to what degree without losing the...the..intensity.

 

that makes sense.
it sounds like decreasing the voltage while maintaining the wattage.

 

THAT'S A BIT OF OVER-SIMPLIFYING. "DECREASING VOLTAGE WHILE MAINTAINING WATTAGE" IS ACCOMPLISHED ALL THE TIME NOWADAYS. It has to do with the classic equation P = VA. You drop the voltage and amperage will increase to maintain the same wattage. That's how airconditioner's circuit breakers are tripped when voltage drops because the ampere shoots up beyond the breaker's limit.

"The amplitude and the phase of the pulse would be smeared out" is very deep statement indeed. Because amplitude is denoted by lambda and we do not speak of it in our day to day household or automotive wiring. Phase is even more remote...you only get to see it when you look at the oscilloscope. Phase is a sine-wave in AC and it is the product of how armatures(spelling?) and rotors are oriented in the power generator. Remember 50Hz, 60Hz, sort of ****? Yeah that has to do with phase. In our house, we get 220V from the resulting vector of adding two 110V lines of different phases. I know all these **** because our family is in power-generation business.

Now let's talk about smearing out the amplitude. Normally if you change the amplitude of light, the color changes. But I don't know the smearing of phase because smearing is not a scientific term. Rather, it's more like a hobo talk. If you have a wave-generator, you can play with it to tweak the phase...and watching it on the scope is fun.

Scientists have found out long time ago that light slows down in air and water as in oppose to vaccum. We just have not been able to do it manually. It seems, the good news now is we can do it manually at will. The bad news is -- a chinese chick did it.

What was the rest of us doing? Changing tie-rods on our Benzes? Singing at the church choir?

 

so does it means that you alter the frequency of the wave (vertically) in a more controlled manner?

it is difficult to do in sine wave, but in modified sine wave (something like a stair), it's easier.

i'm going nut understanding how they slow it down... we are assuming that there is no distraction, filter, or any optic smearing. just on electrical side.

 

I can't find the particular article I read, but I found there are plenty of them out there after doing a Google.

corkscrew and major pretty much have a handle on this stuff. Apparently IBM used a Swiss-cheese-like silicon chip to slow the light. Knowing that don't help me at all, though.

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