George Dvorsky, io9, on the recent news that German scientists successfully “froze” light for one minute:
It sounds weird and it is. The reason for wanting to hold light in its place (aside from the sheer awesomeness of it) is to ensure that it retains its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state), thus making it possible to build light-based quantum memory. And the longer that light can be held, the better as far as computation is concerned.
This has implications for things like quantum internet. Very cool.