Speed of Light Lowered in Vacuum: Consequences for Relativity?

[PaulElu]

Hello !
A few days ago, I came across this article
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-30944584

And I was wondering if it has any consequences with the relativity ? I mean, in my mind, light velocity is supposed to be constant in vaccum, c0 = 3e08 [m/s] approximatively...

What do you think ?

Paul.

 

[Ibix]

It has no consequences for relativity. If you track down the paper they are referring to the last sentence of the abstract effectively says so, pointing out that structured waves do not, in general, travel at c.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6224/857

 

[Nugatory]

Hello !
What do you think ?

That article is (rather grotesquely) misdescribing the actual work and the conclusions drawn from it. This is a common problem with popular press descriptions of scientific work... it's as if they didn't even bother reading the abstract, which says "Our work highlights that, even in free space, the invariance of the speed of light only applies to plane waves.".

You will find a link to the actual paper here and much discussion of this and similar experiments in other threads here.