Can light be slowed or stopped and if so what does it become?

yes, light can be stopped, lene hau first slowed down light to 37 kilometers an hour in 1997, and a few years later (i think 2001) another group of scientists managed to stop light momentarily.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/01.24/01-s...

they do this, by shooting a laser into a substance, which is called a bose-einstein condensate. which are particles that are so cold, that the molecoles/atoms fuse together to form one superfluidic cloud. these condensates have to be suspended in magnetic fields.

it still remains light. you simply see the laser go into the cendensate on one end, and it not emerging on the other until teh substance is heated a little, and light starts moving again.

heres an italian guy trying to explain teh effect. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdAEGAN1NxI

and heres lene hau herself explaning whats going on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ESAXAlrRLk

When light is stopped it does not exist.

Light slows in various mediums,water,glass etc depending on the optical density.

To exist a photon of light must either travel or be in a state of continued acceleration.

People experimenting with photon gates for computers use something called a reverse opal as a resonance cavity.

A photon emitted into the cavity should bounce around,never coming to a full stop.

Competition in this field is very secretive so not much information is available.

The trick is to stop a photon and release it at will utilizing it as a high speed gate.

If it works it should increase the speed of computers by a great deal

Except for Mr Zwink, all other answerers are badly wrong. Light can actually be stopped. "Mr Zwink" described it and named the link.

But it can also be accelerated in a form of "pulse". We already found methods how to get light to travel at a speed fo about 1.2 c That delivers evidence that Einstein made indeed the mistake to believe the speed of light would be absolute ... it isn't ... it always depends on the medium. Anyway, Einstein could not think of "pulsed light" nothing like that did exist at his time. However, that's not interesting. It would become interesting if we could transfer such technique on objects having a limited, nonetheless measurable mass. It might take another 200 years, however, to find the answers.

light is not slowed down in the sence of a blanket reduction of speed. ligth travels the 300,000km a second in a vacum because the photons have nothig to get in their way however pass it throught a soild but clear object like frozen sodium and the photons colide with the electrons and this stops them until the electron moves out of the way allowing light to continue at which point the photon will automatically resume its speed of 300,000km/s it does this without any acceleration or decelleration so light always moves at C

Light can be bent using refraction (looking at an image in a glass of water is a very simple test of this and so are prisms - although strictly speaking, prisms don't bend light, they split it)

We don't understand too much about the properties of light at the moment and with our current level of technology, slowing it is out of the question, but in sceince, something is only impossible until it's not.

i think light can be slowed by using a medium between the light source and the destination it travels, like a glass partition or anything that is thicker than air, in this conditions light slows down to reach a larger area.

using some methods of refraction also can slow down the light.

i think that stopping light would occur when you use an object to stop it from penetrating somewhere.

in my opinion when you stop light it creates a shadow that's how you could call it. no?

The speed of light is a constant.

It cannot be slowed down it can only be made to travel further.

Light can be stopped by an opaque barrier. If the barrier is black it will absorb all the light which will slightly raise the temperature of the barrier.

If the barrier is colored then it will reflect the light of its color and absorb the rest.

Example..Lasers cutting steel.

yes light can be slowed down. speed of light depends on the medium in which it is travelling. speed of light is maximum in vaccum. it is about one half of it's speed when it travels through water. light cannot be stopped it can be bent, it's path can be changed.

Light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that is visible to the eye (visible light) or, in a technical or scientific context, the word is sometimes used to mean electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths.[1] The elementary particle that defines light is the photon. The three basic properties of light (i.e., all electromagnetic radiation) are:

Intensity, or alternatively amplitude, which is related to the perception of brightness of the light,

Frequency, or alternatively wavelength, perceived by humans as the color of the light, and

Polarization (angle of vibration), which is only weakly perceptible by humans under ordinary circumstances.

Due to its wave–particle duality, light can exhibit properties of both waves and particles.

So..

A good link to download Photon is: http://bitly.com/1k4ocyK

It's a must have program.

Regards

when light is lost, it will first slow down, then stop and then ask for directions. kinda like a blonde.