Speed of light a laser beam is swept quickly across a distant object, the spot of light can move faster than "c", although the initial movement of the spot is delayed because of the time it takes light to get to the distant object at the speed "c". However, the only physical entities that are moving are the laser and its emitted light, which travels at the speed "c" from the laser to the various positions of the spot. Similarly, a shadow projected onto a distant object can be made to move faster than "c", after a delay in time. In neither case
Speed of light light to a "complete standstill" by passing it through a Bose–Einstein condensate of the element rubidium, one team at Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge. However, the popular description of light being "stopped" in these experiments refers only to light being stored in the excited states of atoms, then re-emitted at an arbitrarily later time, as stimulated by a second laser pulse. During the time it had "stopped," it had ceased to be light. This type of behaviour is generally microscopically true of