Relativity meets its match...

It may be counter-intuitive to people but one of the basic tenets of relativity is that you cannot send information faster than the speed of light. However, if you are able to s..l..o..w.. the light down: ZDnet reports on some very cool stuff coming from the IBM R&D labs:

IBM slows light, readies it for networking
IBM has created a chip that can slow down light, the latest advance in an industrywide effort to develop computers that will use only a fraction of the energy of today's machines.

The chip, called a photonic silicon waveguide, is a piece of silicon dotted with arrays of tiny holes. Scattered systematically by the holes, light shown on the chip slows down to 1/300th of its ordinary speed of 186,000 miles per second. In a computer system, slower light pulses could carry data rapidly, but in an orderly fashion. The light can be further slowed by applying an electric field to the waveguide.

Researchers at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, have slowed light in laboratories. IBM, though, claims that its light-slowing device is the first to be fashioned out of fairly standard materials, potentially paving the way toward commercial adoption.

Very awesome. They are not just shining a flashlight and using some variant of Morse Code to send data, the data is riding in the light itself and because the light has been slowed down, the relativistic effects that damp out the transmission of information do not seem to come into play. This sure is a fun time to be alive!