Trick of the light

And having imagined this eagerness, one might move on to questions about the state of science in general: Does it suffer the same inattention as the arts, as international news, as women's basketball? Forced to compete with "Survivor" and Puff Daddy, the scientific community must rewrite the universe if it wants to be noticed.

And this might not even sound like overstatement, were it not for the problem of the NEC press release. Issued by the Corporate Communications Division in New York (rather than by the institute itself, in Princeton), the four-paragraph statement begins with a headline that would have any reporter on the phone: "NEC Success in Superluminal Light Propagation Proves Light Can Travel Faster than its Speed in Vacuum."

It was something of a bait-and-switch, except that NEC forgot the switch part. The press release uses the same language that appeared in the papers -- light traveling "faster than its acknowledged speed," etc. It says that the research work "may result in significantly faster information transfer speeds across networks and in computers." This is true, but misleading: The transmission of information could conceivably improve, but it would have the anomalous dispersion, and not a new speed of light, to thank. Information, Wang admits, will never travel faster than the speed of light.

The statement even deploys the same incongruent disclaimer about Einstein: "Despite exceeding the vacuum speed of light, the experiment is not at odds with Einstein's theory of relativity and is explainable by existing physical theory."

In a subsequent interview, Chadi conceded that the press release was overblown.

"This is quite well known," he said of the finding that certain light waves can appear to exceed the speed of light. "The physics here is not new."

Chadi said that the original report was "more carefully written" and contained "no extraneous claims." He would not say why the press release -- to which Wang contributed -- came out so differently. He would not comment on whether there was pressure to make headlines from NEC, which posted a profit of $101 million in fiscal year 2000, following heavy losses the previous year.

Wang has a right to be mad at the mainstream press. Not only did it take him away from his research long enough to correct all the erroneous reporting, but it forced him to issue a possibly frustrating correction: The real findings had nothing to do with revising a fundamental law of physics, and for that he should never have made the papers in the first place.

This is speculation; Wang's not talking. But all the recent wrangling in his life exposes a few facts about science and the media that are hard to miss: Standard science articles are legless. People resist slogging through the dryness because there's no payoff -- every single story ends the same: Maybe. Maybe we'll walk on Mars, maybe our cars will run on algae, maybe time travel awaits us in the future. "Maybe" is a lousy kicker and our eyes glaze.

And in these same publications, nothing plays like a gadget story. People step into traffic reading about robots that can fry eggs, and the gleam on the chrome must lead the occasional theoretical physicist to avert his eyes -- or get carried away hyping his own work.

Monday's Los Angeles Times, for example, ran a 1,418-word tech story on the new toys we can get for our cars. DVDs, video games, flash memory cards, computerized address books -- the article was undeniably more compelling than an explanation of anomalous dispersion in light pulses.

Articles like these know what we want done with Scientific American and other monthly deserts: We want the science part forwarded to the development people, who do the understanding and walk away with an actual device -- hand-held, if possible.

Between the torturous science article and the showy gadget log opens a chasm the size of a universe, a chasm so wide even light -- traveling at light-speed, no less -- can barely make its way across. When it does arrive, all bluster and vim, we remind ourselves to mention it at a party that night, but pretty much live our lives unshaken.

Someone wanted our lives more shaken. Maybe several people wanted our lives more shaken, and maybe they didn't even know they wanted this. But if someone greased the PR pipeline with questionable information, and if the press let too much of it slip beneath the radar, this only evinces an unfortunate coincidence of two camps wanting more science in the dailies.

Anomalous dispersion in a transparent medium will never grab imaginations like the latest talking car. Abstractly, we may like the idea of science without application -- it's like a person taking a walk but not buying anything -- but in practice, we demand material consequence of our scientists. They can keep their pursuit of knowledge to themselves; we want flying cars, Einstein spanked. If the beaker doesn't explode bright red when you add the powder, why bother adding the powder?

And so finally, because there is only one solution, and one way to conclude this article: The truth, as told by Lijun Wang, Arthur Dogariu and Alexander Kuzmich in their Nature article. Follow the link, which moves just under the speed of light. This what we should've read all along -- the original report, unstrained by the tug of newsprint. It's no fun to read, but it's science.

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