http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54394,00.html

The above article poses a possible challenge to Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Perhaps I misunderstood the article, but slowing down the speed of light in no way violates Relativity.

Scientists have slowed light down to about 38 MPH with the Bose-Einstein condensate. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html

this is more directed at john...
slowing the speed at which light is travelling is actually very easy... all you have to do is make it pass through a different material. this is what causes light to bend in a prism, lenses, a glass of water, even those mirror-like spots on a road on a hot day. the difference is that the scientist this article is about claims that light travelling in a vacuum has slowed down relative to the speed it used to travel in a vacuum. this would indeed change our understanding of relativity. i suspect that time will show that light hasn't slowed.
the article says that "the wrong type of photons were emitted." i suspect that what they mean by type is actually the energy of the photon was not what the expected. the energy of a photon emitted by an atom, however, is not quite as constant as they make it sound. if the atom is moving away from the direction in which it emits the photon, the photon will have less energy than if the atom is moving towards the direction in which it emits the photon. the short article really doesn't give much detail, but it wouldn't suprise me if we eventually determine that at the time the photon was released the quasar was moving.
i'd be very interested if anyone has read the actual Nature article had any insight.

Stopping light in its tracks ?

This improbable feat -- stopping light -- was accomplished by two teams. One was led by Ron Walsworth, a physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the other by Lene Hau of Harvard University's Department of Physics. Walsworth's group used warm rubidium vapors to pause their laser beam; Hau's group used a super-cold sodium gas to do the same thing.
Source: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/27mar_stoplight.htm

Thanks for the clarification Methos! You helped shed some light on the subject! I missed that point in the original article

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If they proove their case, then we can think about rewriting the science books. But I don't think they have prooved it just yet.

When faced with two or more competing theories, it's best to go with the simplest one. Either everything we know about the Universe and every scientific and mathematical working model of Relativity is wrong...or these guys made a mistake. I'm betting they made a mistake.

This reminds me of the whole "Cold Fussion" fiasco.

Whatever light speed was or is, it does not affect relativity one iota. If light speed was 500,000 miles/sec 12 billion years ago, 186,000 miles/sec now, and say 100,000 miles/sec 10 billion years from now, the important fact is not its actual numerical speed, but rather, the fact that it represents an upper limit of travel speed at the period in question. Interesting, though, that the article questions relativity, but assumes the thermodynamic law of "can't get something from nothing" as being infallible. Don't they know that the Universe came from Nothing, and to Nothing shall it return??

AND, let's not forget those all-to-important qualifiers:

"A team of Australian scientists has proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity."