Slow Light
Invisibility, Teleportation and Other Mysteries of Light
by Sidney Perkowitz
Mem. Ed. $19.99
Pub. Ed. $25.00
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Slow Light
Over the past two decades, physicists have worked wonders with light in the laboratory. They have slowed light to a dead stop; made entangled photons communicate across large distances instantaneously; and rendered objects effectively invisible. Slow Light enticingly details the science behind it all.
Sidney Perkowitz covers light’s basic properties, such as the wave/particle duality; chronicles attempts to measure its speed; and shows why Einstein’s special relativity implies that neither information nor particles with mass can travel faster than light. Yet most of the book is devoted to experiments that sound like science fiction.
We see, for example, how physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau managed to slow light to 38 miles per hour in 1995, by applying a special technique to alter the properties of a cold atomic gas. By 2001, Hau managed to stop light completely in its tracks for a millisecond—and in 2009, for an entire second—before sending it on its way again.
Here as well is the work on “retroflection” that Susumu Tachi and his colleagues pioneered in 2003, which produces the effect of virtual transparency—or invisibility, if you will—by projecting in front of an object the scene behind it. Perkowitz also reviews the work done by Anton Zeilinger in 1997, when he managed to teleport the polarization state of one of two entangled photons. We also visit the National Ignition Facility in California, where 192 merged laser beams are designed to replicate conditions in the early universe.
Complete with a look at the implications of such breakthroughs for ideas from science fiction, ranging from Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak to Star Trek transporters, Slow Light shines with insights from the cutting edge of physics.
Softcover : 150 pages
Publisher: World Scientific Publications ( August 12, 2011 )
Item #: 13-421988
ISBN: 9781848167520
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 inches
Product Weight: 7.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Book No Good 
October 02, 2011
The book "Slow Light" is no good. The title is misleading. All it does is mention slow light occasionally, in a boring discussion of the most superficial properties of light.
Reviewer: Kenneth E
September 01, 2011
A fotòn is a wave only. The mote is the elèctròn.
Liht doesn't travel (travail, trepal) but fares.
Fastness is not a speed. Glue is fast; rockets are swift; motes are fleet; pizza is speedy; birds are quick.
Celerity is medium-dependent and matter regularly fares swifter in the Chèrèncov effect.
Entanglement is not interaction but correlation, the same as a pair of socks. Nor is entanglement teleportation; quantum tunnelling is.
Reviewer: Autymn C
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