8 Ground-Breaking Discoveries You Didn't Know Were Made By Women

5. Lene Vestergaard Hau: Stopped Light In Its Tracks

Light is the fastest thing in the universe, moving at 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and light itself is a notoriously slippery customer. However, in 1999, Lene Vestergaard Hau managed to slow it down to a leisurely 17 m/s and, in 2001, was able to bring it to a complete halt. She was able to do this with a supercooled cloud of sodium atoms, kept at just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. In her further work, she has also been able to convert light into matter and back again. Casual. The experiments of Hau and her colleagues are dabbling in the manipulation and control of the famously enigmatic world of quantum mechanics. This isn't just playing god for the sake of it, the research is likely going to be the driving force behind the development of quantum supercomputers. It's the kind of technology that will probably one day allow you to Tweet directly from your brain at lightening speed (and perform vastly complicated computation tasks that will revolutionise science and technology ... or whatever).