Q&A with Lene Hau

As the Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau, a tenured professor at Harvard, explained to me how she slows light down -- and, when it's going at a "comfortable bicycling speed," does something to it that's weird even by the standards of quantum mechanics -- I couldn't resist blurting out the suspicion I'd harbored since reading about her work: "You're going to win a Nobel Prize if you're not careful." Hau, one of nine MacArthur Fellows picked by the MacArthur Foundation in 2005 to represent the history of its "genius" awards, just laughed and went back to energetically explaining the apparatus she had built to experiment with light.

Read the full article in the Boston Globe