On 10/10/2014 3:45 PM, Lostgallifreyan wrote:
Jerry Stuckle wrote in news:m18uud$pa8$1@dont-
email.me:

But I'm not familiar with what a Bose-Einstein condensate is doing in
this area . Could you please elucidate?


I wish I could! All I know is that someone 'slowed light to a crawl' by
passing it through one. I knos so little about it that I can't make useful
thoughts about the comment.


I remember an article recently in one of the magazines which indicated
scientists had actually stopped a pulse of light for a indefinite time.
I also remember where they slowed light down to a very slow speed. I
don't remember that Bose-Einstein condensates were involved, but I'm not
sure.

I'm also unsure or relativistic effects. When I read about it, I got as far
as reading of some transformative 'foreshortening' described in one book,
only to get completely foozled, and read later than that whole notion was
badly described to the point of beign wrong anyway. Whatever the theory says,
I never found a translation into English that I could grasp. The one thing I
did get was that the approach to this 'speed', a quantity defined as if on a
linear continuum, is unapproachable and that all attempts to do so seem to
result in exponential chages tending to infinity. For that reason, and that
alone, I assume it is not a speed, no matter how it may look. But that is
just how it feels to me when I try to think about it.


Well, one thing - the speed of light is not actually a constant. It is
a constant in vacuum, but in other materials it is slower. So if the
friction/viscosity effects of glass were ignored, for instance, you'd
still have a maximum velocity. It would just be rather significantly
less than in a vacuum.

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