Sort of a non sequitur, but I saw Nvidia's new GPU in action... Pretty freaking awesome. It blew me away.

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*promote... interesting discussions...

Do you have any suggestions for image hosting?

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@dag... no "assister" bonus?

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@Sagemind @rychan... Did we scare them off with Science?

On a side note: There is significant push by Nader Engheta and other to explore materials with refractive index near zero.

This stuff is pretty interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial

You can almost pinpoint when drugs became a problem, when she recovered, and when she relapsed. She was very beautiful once. It is pretty *sad.

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This is equally misguided, but it is closer to the correct interpretation.

>> ^offsetSammy:

This is not accurate. As far as we know, light (a photon) is massless and its speed does not change based on frequency (color).....
>> ^ForgedReality:
Light doesn't have one set speed. Each frequency of light travels at slightly different speeds.

There is so much wrong with this crap. I can't even begin to explain.

@ForgedReality. I am not going to go knee deep into this. But I think you have misunderstood a few things. First, dispersion or the index of refraction of many materials is frequency dependent. Ironically, my graduate research focused extensively on this! In it's simplest form, the dispersion relation is (w/k)^2 = (c/n)^2. That means that the group velocity is limited by c. So in a medium where the refractive index is nonzero the speed of light is less than c. Frequency dependence further complicates the issue. It implies that the refractive index is different at different frequencies. Hence, light at one frequency has a different group velocity than light at another frequency. This has been known since Hertz. It was explained by Einstein.

Lene Hau's experiments at the Rowland Institute are a little more difficult to explain.

It is a little easier to explain something related to her experiments: Bose-Einstein condensates. Naively, you can think about light as billard balls. If you hit one ball moving at a given velocity in a given direction with an identical ball moving in exactly the opposite direction and same velocity, then by momentum transfer you can cancel the motion of both balls. When you do this with light you create a Bose-Einstein condensate.

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