Well, think again. Sometimes it is slower than a crawl.
All schoolchildren know that light is the fastest thing there is.
Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach us, from the Moon just over a second, and two million years from the nearest galaxy. Now, they have gone even further. Addressing a conference in the US, Dr Hau said that you could almost send out a beam of light, go for a cup of coffee and return in time to see the light come out of the other side of her equipment. These atoms are cooled to a temperature of only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, at which all motion stops. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, atoms are hardly moving at all.