Reaching the practical end of physics?

I don't see any end in sight. Science is an obscurantist. Its tentative. Every time we think we know something, something else comes along to challenge those time-honored beliefs.It was not long ago that Einstein claimed that light has a finite speed, and that nothing could usurp that constant. It is an incontrovertible fact, he might have said. Einstein stated that nothing could travel at a higher velocity than 186,000 mps. His theory of general relativity might be in jeopardy if it were incorrect.Well, two experiments have demonstrated that it is entirely possible. A team at the NEC Institute of Princeton University sped light 300 times faster than the commonly accepted belief.Similarly, a joint effort made by the Rowland Institute yielded equally impressive results. This team managed to bring light waves to a one mile per hour crawl and then stopped the beam entirely. They could literally capture, and re-release light, at their whim.Perhaps also as impressive is the famed Slit Experiment you were asking about a few weeks ago. You might be inclined to agree. I don't think there is any reason to assume we've reached a capacity, but rather are possibly at the tip of the iceberg, where what we think we know is being challenged.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Why not though? If E=mc² and c being a constant of light traveling in a vacuum, and either of these studies defy that principle, then isn't Einstein's calculations incorrect?Admittedly I am very much the layman when it comes to the mathematical principles of physics. And there is certainly the possibility that I haven't the sophistication to understand lesser principles that are yet known to me, but this seems pretty straight forward, no?Why wouldn't either of these experiments challenge Special Relativity?

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

What difference is there, other than perhaps large quantities of sodium particles, than space? That's because that article is basically an abstract."In 1999, Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau led a team from Harvard University who succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 metres per second and, in 2001, was able to momentarily stop a beam. She was able to achieve this by using a superfluid. Hau and her associates at Harvard University have since successfully transformed light into matter and back into light using Bose-Einstein condensates. Details of the experiment are discussed in an article in the journal Nature, 8 February 2007. Light is released, then stopped, then re-released.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

I thought the point of the endeavor was to in fact either slow or speed light within a vacuum, as in, they recreated a model that would resemble such conditions.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Whatever the case the may be, I am simply in disagreement with H about the end of physics. Einstein challenged Newtons classical mechanisms. Galileo challenged Coperinicism. Darwin challenged Lamarck. The point is, somebody will always be there to challenge a paradigm.I think it would be foolhardy to assume that we can sort of max out in the realm of physics. I mean, isn't the slit experiment just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to quantum physics?

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Ahhhh, excellent Grasshopper. You are wise and learned in the ways of semantics I sense an ancient Chinese proverb coming my way. I think in a general sort of way, we think we know so damn much... But we are dwarfed by this universe and its secrets. Hence, we know squat in the final analysis. Ah, thanks for the clarification because I seem to have missed that point. Well, what are we down to as the smallest speck of matter these days? Quarks? Neutrinos? Does it get any smaller? Maybe. Know way to know until we get there, I suppose. I'm so much interest in the size of the particle as I am the behavior of the particle. Quantum physics is some mind-bending madness. I am really curious to see what the future will hold. Well, as cavediver said, unless they were successful in reproducing a vacuum-like state, it doesn't challenge Special Relativity. Einstein's theory may end being as timeless as Boltzmann's or Newton's. But it still is groundbreaking, and I'm a little surprised so few people have heard of it. Speeding up light is impressive, but bringing light to a complete stop is an incredible feat.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Probably because it seeks to answer the "why" aspects. Everyone wants to know why. We've known the principle of gravity since the dawn of time quite well. Everyone knew that what goes up, must come down. But we didn't exactly know why for a long time. Newton told us why, which is really what we wanted to know. Next to Barnum's hideous grotesquerie's, your hyperbolic thread title did seems like the second best way of getting people's attention.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake