re: #107 lawhawk

Fermilab was going to try and run a duplicate experiment to see if they could replicate the results, but I’m with you in thinking that one of the parameters of the experiment were off - and it wouldn’t take much to get to the wrong conclusion.

You are thinking of the MINOS experiment which also had some tantalizing data to this effect. However the MINOS people did not have sufficient confidence in their distance measurements to publish as the effect was below their error.

And from what I recall, there was at least one other experiment in the past that claimed particles went faster than light, but which upon closer examination didn’t turn out to be the case.

That would not surprise me, but I am not aware of anything that made a stir like this.

But even if particles can’t go faster than light, scientists have been able to make light slow down (and have for more than a decade).

This is one of those places where I wish the MSM would bother to add as much as three salient sentences to their abysmal reporting that would make everything ore clear.

When we talk about the speed of light - we mean the speed of light in vacuum.

When light goes through any dialectic (like glass, or water, or anything material) it slows down.

Let me repeat that light slows down when it passes through a medium. The speed of light in glass is slower than through air, and through air is slower than through vacuum. This is why light refracts. This is Fermat’s principle.

This is why rainbows spread colours out (there is a frequency dependence also). This is why your straw looks bent in a glass of water.

We’ve known about this for a lot longer than ten years.

What made the recent discovery news worthy was how much light was slowed using exotic materials. But that would not sound nearly as catchy to a science editor trying to make print.