March 27, 2002:
Light can be hard to handle, yet humans have nearly mastered it: We can create light (turn on a flashlight) and destroy it (shine it on black asphalt). We can measure it, bend it, and slow it down. We can use it to propel spacecraft, to transmit telephone conversations, to perform surgery. There seems to be no end to what light can do......Yet until recently there was one thing we couldn't do with light: pause it. Stopping light in its tracks and releasing it again unchanged was beyond human ken.