Circa 2018
In June 2017, physicists achieved ‘liquid light’ at room temperature for the first time ever, making this strange form of matter more accessible than ever.
This matter is both a superfluid, which has zero friction and viscosity, and a kind of Bose-Einstein condensate — sometimes described as the fifth state of matter — and it allows light to actually flow around objects and corners.
Regular light behaves like a wave, and sometimes like a particle, always travelling in a straight line. That’s why your eyes can’t see around corners or objects. But under extreme conditions, light can also act like a liquid, and actually flow around objects.
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