Dear All,

This subject seems to be getting pretty odd. Did you see this article from Sigma Xi's "Science In the News"
http://www.mediaresource.org/news.htm.LIGHT EXCEEDS ITS OWN SPEED LIMIT, OR DOES IT? from The New York Times

The speed at which light travels through a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second, is enshrined in physics lore as a universal speed limit. Nothing can travel faster than that speed, according freshman textbooks and conversation at sophisticated wine bars; Einstein's theory of relativity would crumble, theoretical physics would fall into disarray, if anything could.

Two new experiments have demonstrated how wrong that comfortable wisdom is. Einstein's theory survives, physicists say, but the results of the experiments are so mind-bending and weird that the easily unnerved are advised--in all seriousness--not to read beyond this point.

In the most striking of the new experiments a pulse of light that enters a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas is pushed to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. That is so fast that, under these peculiar circumstances, the main part of the pulse exits the far side of the chamber even before it enters at the near side.
<http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/053000s
ci-physics-light.html>
************************************
Dr. Jack S. Semura
Professor of Physics
Portland State University
Portland, OR 97207-0751
SemuraJ@pdx.edu
Office (503) 725-4229; Fax (503) 725-3888