Deceptive Headlines misrepresenting science

Here is an article I just found:

So it turns out the speed of light might not be constant after all

The content of the article is actually about how scientists are finding that space is not a perfect vacuum, and therefore light is actually traveling a minuscule amount slower through space than it's 186,000 mile per second maximum speed. My first thought was, "Well, duh!"

Indeed. The headline should be "space not quite as hard a vacuum as once thought", if what the article said was actually correct. But it's not. Here's a more technical discussion:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325111154.htm

Two forthcoming European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate.
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So it's saying that even in a perfect vacuum, there are "virtual particles" that slow light down. And this is only theoretical possibility, it has not been observed.
 
Are these virtual particles that have come out of recent CERN research, or have they been around for a while?
 
The idea of virtual particles has been around for decades:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle#Vacuums

In formal terms, a particle is considered to be an eigenstate of the particle number operatora†​a, where a is the particle annihilation operator and a†​ the particle creation operator (sometimes collectively called ladder operators). In many cases, the particle number operator does not commute with the Hamiltonian for the system. This implies the number of particles in an area of space is not a well-defined quantity but, like other quantum observables, is represented by a probability distribution. Since these particles do not have a permanent existence,[clarification needed]​ they are called virtual particles or vacuum fluctuations of vacuum energy. In a certain sense, they can be understood to be a manifestation of the time-energy uncertainty principle in a vacuum.[9][10]

An important example of the "presence" of virtual particles in a vacuum is the
Casimir effect.[11] Here, the explanation of the effect requires that the total energy of all of the virtual particles in a vacuum can be added together. Thus, although the virtual particles themselves are not directly observable in the laboratory, they do leave an observable effect: Their zero-point energy results in forces acting on suitably arranged metal plates or dielectrics.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
Vacuum energy is an underlying background energy that exists in space throughout the entire Universe. One contribution to the vacuum energy may be from virtual particles which are thought to be particle pairs that blink into existence and then annihilate in a timespan too short to observe. They are expected to do this everywhere, throughout the Universe. Their behavior is codified in Heisenberg's energy–time uncertainty principle. Still, the exact effect of such fleeting bits of energy is difficult to quantify.
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Vacuum energy has a number of consequences. In 1948, Dutch physicists Hendrik B. G. Casimir and Dirk Polder predicted the existence of a tiny attractive force between closely placed metal plates due to resonances in the vacuum energy in the space between them. This is now known as the Casimir effect and has since been extensively experimentally verified.
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What seems to be new is the model of the fluctuations in the levels of these virtual particles.

Quantum physics makes my head hurt.
 
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