A team of Scottish scientists has made light travel slower than the speed of light.

They sent photons - individual particles of light - through a special mask. It changed the photons' shape - and slowed them to less than light speed.

The photons remained travelling at the lower speed even when they returned to free space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-30944584

I understand the idea behind this, just. Believing it is a bit more difficult. Does this mean I can have my photons shaped like Dolly Parton's boobies?     

I find it interesting ( more than Dolly's boobs) that Hawkins are working on a new theory (if the detected gravitational ripples turns out to be real).

Any more info on that bear? I'd be interested to read about it.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/stephen-hawking-working-new-theory-everything

Thanks, its fascinating how quickly we are starting to understand more and more, I wonder what we will know even just by 2020

It was looking really good, until some other scientists pointed out that it was far more dusty in the area than they had taken into account

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329882.600-ripples-from-dawn-of-creation-vanish-in-a-puff-of-dust.html

Even worse the results may point to cosmic inflation being a 'wild goose chase'.

QuoteMost inflationary models require that, as you look at larger and larger scales of the universe, you should see stronger and stronger gravitational waves. In BICEP2's data, they get weaker. Contrary to what the BICEP2 collaboration said initially, Parkinson's analysis suggests that the BICEP2 results, if legitimate, actually rule out any reasonable form of inflationary theory.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429894.100-cosmic-inflation-is-dead-long-live-cosmic-inflation.html

Needless to say a lot of scientists want these results proved false and quickly brushed under the mat.

They aren't, Hawkins back to 'drawing board'.

Quote
Scientists who claimed last year to have found a pattern in the sky left by the super-rapid expansion of space just fractions of a second after the Big Bang were mistaken.

The signal had been confounded by light emission from dust in our own galaxy.

This is the conclusion of a new study involving the US-led BICEP2 team itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31058529

Damn, that was looking so promising too.

http://www.iflscience.com/physics/quantum-equations-dispute-big-bang

I for one am not convinced by the big bang theory, it requires too much coincidence of physics. It also requires complete removal of gravity in the early universe.

That said it does give the option of a very nice repeating of expansion collapse expansion. It also provides a method of reversing the entropy issue. Problem with this being there doesn't seem to be enough slowing down for a collapse to happen, indeed further away stuff appears to be actually speeding up, although this may be an illusion of distance.

No matter what originally happened you can always ask, but what was before that? This simple question is, in the end, unanswerable - we just don't know.

It's the same as energy cannot be created or destroyed, what it should say is 'we know of no way energy can be created or destroyed' or 'we have never observed energy created or destroyed'.  Similarly we can never see the beginning of the universe, although we may be able to infer some details.

This might be interesting too http://planetpreterist.com/news-2896.html