An article today in the New York Times describes a cool experiment with “backwards propogating light.” It’s a cool experiment, but what I love best from the article is the following line:
However, the pulses were in a shape known as Gaussian, which is, in principle, infinite in width, though in practice not quite that wide.
Winner of the understatement of the year?
The Gaussian wave is not so deep as a well, nor as wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.