Light completely stopped for a record-breaking minute
"To break the minute barrier [they] fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a second beam that entered the crystal by switching off the first laser and hence the transparency."<p>Thus continuing my inability to understand what the fuck anyone is talking about whenever the word "quantum" is used in a sentence.<p>I mean, seriously. This has to be the one area of general reader science journalism in which the journalists -- having about as much as idea as I do about what the physicists are talking about -- just copy down whatever the guys in the lab coats are saying and print it.<p>I work in research computing.  When I start talking to someone from our communications department and use a word like "interoperability," they say, "Whoa, slow down.  You have to spell that out for our readers."  But "quantum superposition?"  Oh, what the hell.<p>I understand that is this very, very complicated stuff, and that they can't explain the whole thing from top to bottom every time they mention quantum mechanics.  But pithy little paragraphs like this explain absolutely nothing.