A team of Scottish scientists found a way to slow down the speed of light—even in a vacuum—by changing its shape. We already know that light can slow down in the real world—for example, if it passes through a glass of water. But light speed has been thought of as a constant when it travels through a vacuum, where no other forces or particles are thought to be acting upon it. Researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Heriot-Watt provided the first real evidence that that's not always true. They fired two photons—tiny particle-like bundles of light—side by side in a vacuum. But they sent one particle through a device that reshaped its structure. The reshaped particle actually traveled slower than the one left unaltered. The team published its results Thursday in the online edition of Science Express, though it had been previously available on arXiv.org.
Read the full article at Science News.
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