r Two ment, 300,000,000 meters per second (m/s). As a Trivial Pursuit note, although scientists long considered the speed of light in a vacuum to represent the highest rate at which anything can travel, in July 2000 this changed. In an experiment conducted in Princeton, New Jersey, physi- cists transmitted a pulse of laser light through a chamber filled cesium vapor SO quickly that it left the chamber before fully entering it. According to press reports, the pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have traversed if the chamber had been a vacuum. Although a practical application of this experiment may not be developed for quite some time, this observation does indicate that the speed of light can be pushed beyond previously assumed boundaries. NEWTON'S PRISM Although people viewed rainbows a long time prior to the birth of Isaac Newton, Newton's work in 1672 formed the basis for the modern treatment of light as a wave. During 1672, Newton discovered, in experiments with a prism, that light could be split into a series of colors. As he used a prism to analyze light, Newton noted that the colors produced by light passing through the prism were arranged in a precise order; specifically, red was followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. If you remember the good old days when you pulled an all-nighter to study for a physics test, the name Roy G. Biv may come to mind. That fictional name was used by many students as a way to remember the order of colors in the light spectrum. Although Newton's prism was the pioneering effort in defining the components of visible light, it took many years of effort to further clari- fy the color of objects. When modern science was applied to differentiate colors, it was concluded that no single wavelength exists for many colors, which are created by a mixture of wavelengths. For example, purple rep- resents a mixture of red and violet wavelengths. MAXWELL'S EFFORT Approximately 100 years after Newton's work, James Clerk Maxwell showed that light was a form of el