Slow Light - Slow Light in Fiction

Slow Light in Fiction

Slow glass is a fictional material in Bob Shaw's short story "Light of other days" (Analog, 1966), and several subsequent stories. The glass, which delays the passage of light by years or decades, is used to construct windows, called scenedows, that enable city dwellers, submariners and prisoners to watch "live" countryside scenes. "Slow glass" is a material where the delay light takes in passing through the glass is attributed to photons passing "...through a spiral tunnel coiled outside the radius of capture of each atom in the glass."

Shaw later reworked the stories into the novel Other Days, Other Eyes (1972).

The slow light experiments are mentioned in Dave Eggers' novel You Shall Know Our Velocity. In the novel, the speed of light is described as a "Sunday crawl".

On Discworld, where Terry Pratchett's novel series takes place, light travels only a few hundred miles per hour due to Discworld's "embarrassingly strong" magic field.

In Maurice Renard's novel Le maître de la lumière (The Master of Light, 1933), the description of “luminite” might be one of the earliest mentions of slow glass.

These window panes are of a composition through which light is slowed down in the same way as when it passes through water. You know well, Péronne, how one can hear more quickly a sound through, for example, a metal conduit or some other solid than through simple space. Well, Péronne, all this is of the same family of phenomena!

Here is the solution. These panes of glass slow down the light at an incredible rate since there need be only a relatively thin sheet to slow it down a hundred years. It takes one hundred years for a ray of light to pass through this slice of matter! It would take one year for it to pass through one hundredth of this depth.