Ever wanted to cycle faster than the speed of light? In 1999, physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau made this possible by slowing light down to just 6.7ms−1 (15 miles per hour) before stopping it completely in 2001.
Lene Hau was born in Denmark in 1959. Neither of her parents had a background in science, but Lene proved to be talented from a young age, skipping a year at school and showing a real passion for mathematics and — on discovering quantum mechanics — physics. Lene received her PhD in physics in 1991 from Aarhus University, after which a scholarship from the brewers, Carlsberg, enabled her to move to the USA. She worked at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a senior scientist until, in 1999, she joined the faculty at Harvard University.
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