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Danish physicist Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau, who with a team of collaborators, has found a way to slow light down to about 38 miles an hour. Dr. Hau and the physics team, who work at the Rowland Institute for Science and Harvard University, expect to slow the speed of light down to 120 feet an hour. Scientists slow light to a crawl Speed altered by aiming laser through group of atoms

BOSTON, Feb. 18 - A moonbeam zips to Earth in little more than a second. Scientists have managed to slow the speed of light to a leisurely 38 mph, a pace that would get a highway motorist pulled over for driving too slow.

LIGHT NORMALLY moves through a vacuum at about 186,000 miles per second. Nothing in the universe moves faster, and Albert Einstein theorized that nothing ever will. But a Danish physicist and her collaborators trimmed that speed by a factor of 20 million.

‘CRAZY, BIZARRE PROPERTIES’

"We have really created an optical medium with crazy, bizarre properties," said Lene Vestergaard Hau, whose team accomplished the feat in slowness by shooting a laser through extremely cold sodium atoms, which worked like "optical molasses" to slow the light.

While slow-speed light now is just a laboratory plaything for top physicists, Hau believes practical applications are not too far in the future. She envisions improved communications technology, television displays, even night-vision devices.

The research, conducted at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge and Harvard University and described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, isn’t something that can be replicated in a home workshop.

The laggard laser moves through a high density group of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, created when matter is cooled almost to absolute zero, the lowest temperature theoretically possible. That is 459.67 degrees below zero.

EVEN SLOWER

Now that the scientists have reduced the speed of light to 38 mph, they believe it’s possible to slow it 1,000 times further - to a crawl. "A human could move faster than that," said Stanford University’s Steve Harris, who participated in the project. "But a human couldn’t move through a Bose-Einstein condensate, I’ll tell you that."