Scientists claim to alter the speed of light

From LiveScience...

Scientists have recently succeeded in doing all sorts of fancy things with light, including slowing it down and even stopping it all together. Now a team at the Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland is controlling the speed of light using simple off-the-shelf optical fibers, without the aid of special media such as cold gases or crystalline solids like in other experiments.

"This has the enormous advantage of being a simple, inexpensive procedure that works at any wavelength," said Luc Thvenaz, lead author of the study detailing the research.

Using a technique called Stimulated Brillouin Scattering, the researchers were able to slow down or ratchet up the speed of light like the gas pedal on a car. They succeeded in reducing the speed of light by almost a factor of 4 (although that's still plenty fast at 46,500 miles per second), but even more dramatically, the team was also able to speed up the speed of light.

Unfortunately this will ultimately conflict with the religion of Evolution, since one of the claims made by followers of that religion is that based on [rather dubious] claims of the distance of various stellar objects, the consistency of the speed of light proves that there had to be that much time for it to get here. Ignoring for the moment the seriously flawed method in which stellar distances are almost randomly guessed — that the speed of light can be variable throws the whole argument out the window.

I say unfortunately because when any scientific breakthrough contradicts the religion of Evolution, the religion get precedence, and the actual science must then be re-interpreted or even discarded based on the ability to force it to conform to the dogma of Evolution. Thus the claim, in the article, that the whole thing may just be an illusion.

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 23, 2005 09:26 AM