(January 8, 2012 at 2:03 am)chipan Wrote: well this is really a tangent off the main topic but i suppose i'll support some evidence. not looking very far but here.
http://opfocus.org/index.php?topic=story&v=8&s=4
Quote: Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour.http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light
The first link is interesting but...
Is Light Slowing Down? Wrote:It is clear now that the speed of light must be constant regardless of the propagation direction or the motion of the source or observer — indeed this is one of the postulates of Einstein’s relativity. The constancy of the speed of light is so fundamental and accepted now that in 1983 the 17th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures decreed that "The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second." At this point c cannot change by definition.
So there you have it - C is always equal to C.
As to your other two links - note that light is always passing through a medium to do that, which involves physical processes that don't technically slow down light because of the way that photons pass through various materials.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
