Chilluminati Podcast - Midweek Mini: Turning Light into a "Super Solid"?

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

The Chilluminati boys look at the crazy stuff science is up to. All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Heroforge - http://www.heroforge.com Promocode: Chill Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro

Hi, everybody, welcome to the video to the bonus show. It's the mayor of Candytown. He's here. He decided to join us. Minnesota episode 220, I think. Might be 221. Welcome. Welcome to Patreon. Look, I got something.

I just want to jump into mine right away because it's very exciting. Damn. Okay. Either we're going to immediately be like, man, that's really crazy. I got nothing to say because it's science or we could talk about all the things it could mean. Okay. So this came out two days ago.

I saw this on the science subred initially. Right now I'm just reading an article. from Newsweek. Scientists have turned light into a super solid for the first time. Let's talk about whatever that means, I guess. Scientists have succeeded in making light behave like a super solid for the first time, a breakthrough that could improve our understanding of this exotic phase of matter. A super solid has an ordered structure like a solid,

but can also flow without friction like a super fluid. Thank you for doing that. I was about to ask what a super solid was. And previously, they've only been produced in so-called Bose-Einstein condensates, which are formed when a gas of atoms is cooled to near absolute zero. And that, just so you know, was a fifth state of matter that was discovered in 2020 on the ISS in a cold atom lab experiment. This is just five years after the discovery of this fifth state of matter.

we are now moving on to, uh, inducing behavior of a super solid in light. Um, they go, quote, this is only the beginning of understanding of super solidity, said a, uh, Italy based physicist Antonio Gianf, uh, Gianfade, I believe is how you say that, of CNR nanotech and David, uh, of the university of Pavia in a research summary. So this is that you guys are knocked out. I'm terrible with foreign names. I'm so, wait. So, so a super solid is not necessarily a solid.

Right. It's like Cyclops's eye beams. It's like liquid, but with the crystal order of solids. It's a huge part of it. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to keep going here because they talk about that. In our lives, we tend to encounter matter mainly in three distinct phases,

solid, liquid, gases. But you obviously, we know plasmas is something that we exist and we come across with flescent light, obviously. But they say at temperatures close to absolute zero, the quantum mechanical nature of atoms, emerges, and exotic phases of matter appear. Such exotic phases include super solids, which were first predicted back in the 60s, but were only first demonstrated in 2017 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The science evolved is basically just like indecipherable for us, so don't even, fucking don't know them, doesn't matter. They said, we decided to investigate whether these conditions can be achieved in a photonic semiconductor platform in which photons are conducted in a similar way to electrons to enable photos to behave as a super solid. To create their photonic super solid, the researchers fired a laser light at a special semiconductor platform made of aluminum gallium arsenide in which photos are conducted like electrons in metal. But I don't know what that means. The system allows

the photons of light to occupy one of three quantum states, all of which, you know, have the same energy, but sport different wave numbers. So there are different wavelength. At the start of experiment, a few photons in the platform are largely incoherent, but as they hit a threshold count, they form a single condensate. The two scientists explain it via a comparison to taking seats in an auditorium. Quote, imagine being in a crowded theater where all the seats are occupied except for three in the front row, one in the center, and the other two.

at opposite ends of the row. The central seat has the best view, so that's where people want to sit, but only a single person can sit there. In a quantum theater where bosonic particles, particles with integer spin, and what I look that up, and what that means is bosonic particles

can be stacked all in the same space, like endlessly. They don't really take up mass the way we understand it to. Everyone can sit in the central, so yeah, in a quantum theater where bosonic particles go, everyone can sit in the central seat forming what is called a Bose-Einstein condensate,

a superfluid state in which a large fraction of particles simultaneously occupy the lowest energy quantum state. Oh shit. So this is like when we talk about quantum computing, we talk about computers that are working on a quantum level, this is basically the process in which they would data transfer in that platform. Yeah, yeah, I think that's very similar to how this works. as far as I understand it. Um, they basically say, uh, the photons form, the photons form satellite condensates that have opposite non zero wave numbers, but this, so I, I imagine that I can go any

direction of like, as long as it's not zero, any number in any direction, probably, which just determines what their wave form is. That makes, I guess I think that makes sense, um, but the same energy. So they have opposite non zero wave numbers, but the same energy. That's funny talking about. magnets and now we're talking about opposite numbers that have to be exactly the same opposing each other. In this way, he concluded the super solid state emerges and a spatial modulation in the density of photons in the system occurs that is characteristic of the super solid state.

And the best rundown on Reddit I read when they talk about what they mean by super solid is you take an egg carton, very similar to the movie theater thing, you replay, you take out a couple of the eggs and you put them with like magic light eggs and then once you put them in the carton, it sort of makes all the eggs and the carton kind of magic light itself. And now the eggs can all be interswitched with each other seamlessly at all at the same time. Basically quantum mechanics takes place and you're all states all at once. But they don't, they only need a few of those particles to make that happen. And what they did is they fired a laser through crystals and it stacked up the photons, which is what created this light acting.

like a super solid state um and when asked like when people were talking about what this could mean at least in the science subreddit they were talking about things from frictionless rails to shoes that no longer give you blisters to coats that slide on and off like this is just like don't know but basically don't know what it means i mean a lot of things yeah changes the concept of matter yeah i mean if matter it can be like before it was four types of matter now there's a fifth type of matter and it seems like like if we're operating in that and we could take light, uh, you know, like the difference between, um, trying to think of like the, the best way, like, if we are using light as a super

solid, that kind of changes the way we do things. Yeah, it's, it's weird. Let me read this is from a couple of, uh, because basically we're not using like, so there's someone's break, someone broke down the abstract of the paper and they say, uh, the super. solid properties do not belong to the light alone, nor are they a passive property of the crystal lattice, which is what they're being fired through. Instead, they are caused by exciton polaritons, hybrid particles formed when light strongly couples to matter. Right. Oh, yeah, no, because there's like atomic super solids, right? Yeah. But this is light based, which is a whole different thing and manipulating light as potential to change everything yeah like making light

into a thing we can use besides just like heat and yeah this is like stuff the aliens that used to run the galaxy did that we like found out about later yeah yeah they say basically they fired it through rigid lattice and they said despite being in rigid lattice and they said thanks to the crystal structure. The Polaritons exhibit a global phase coherence, super fluidity, forming a super solid. And it's important that I guess it was fired through the lattice because it's like a super rigid like crystal that's highly organized. But the moment you introduce these like photons that are somewhat quantum variance, the whole thing becomes like wavy in that way and becomes a super solid. It's so weird. Lastly, the system doesn't maintain equilibrium,

meaning it needs energy input to maintain the state just hypothesizing but I imagine this means they can better study Bose Einstein condensate phase transitions more easily now. And then the next comment was, well, I didn't understand a word you said, but it seems like it's something that wouldn't be out of place out of a sci-fi novel. And that's where it is. It's pure sci-fi. That's about right. It feels like a like a light bridge from Halo.

They were saying something, and again, this is in a scope that I have no understanding of. But basically, like, this could lead to faster just space travel. Yeah. We, like, we having, I mean, this is a larger, but like, all we still rely on combustion as our form of generating power. And like the desperate need to get away from that is becoming more and more apparent. And it's like maybe it's always just kind of fucking been there. Right.

Like now we're quantum science plus the magnet thing that we were talking about earlier. Like this probably all, I mean, again, they need to have two waves that are identically opposite numbers. They have to be opposite. They got to be non-zero, but opposite. And they go on, I just want to read this last thing of the comment. I talked about the egg carton. And then the person that used that metaphor said, the novelty here is that it allows us to study unique and otherwise unavailable states of chemistry and physics because normally magic egg mush only exists in very small, difficult to study quantities. There are some really interesting potential applications for this, as light is a boson, meaning there is no limit to how many photons

you can stack in a single space. However, when photos interact with matter, usually they get absorbed and cause electrons to jump around. So if you can stack light in a solid without it exciting and ionizing stuff, there are super cool possible applications here. Hmm. Crazy. Crazy. genuinely so impressed by those in fields of science who are like we have been stuck in one way of thinking for so long that we need to try something new and fresh and quantum you know just theory and dynamics and all of it it's definitely the future and it is coming sooner than you think yeah 2020 they discover the fifth data matter this is coming now and we talked about a couple weeks ago Microsoft induced hypothetical particles and creating them quantum quantum quantum fantastic for shit man what we're we're living through some fucking weird times i mean yeah we are things racing to there are a lot of things racing to both destroy and save the world at this time it's wild man but it does feel a little bit like that the mitchukaku you know like there's a tipping point and we can either become a stage

one you know or a zero and dotas or the zerg let's go yeah it's crazy but that's where we're at yeah I love it just like it's crazy shit anyway that's why I'm glad we got to talk about that because that to me is a sci-fi shit that's like yeah that makes me go maybe aliens are real I don't know I mean look

I'm like I you gotta be a fool to think they're no the universe is massive right there's definitely aliens the question is are they the cool aliens that we think of that like can fly through space and blink through reality that's the kind of shit that we're dealing with and this could be the future or

it could erase human existence. I have no clue. I wonder if this would, yeah, I wonder if this would, because I don't, I'm dumb, right? I'm not a scientist. But if you're turning light into a super solid that moves without friction, does that mean it moves at the speed of light? Is it a solid that flows like liquid at the speed of light? It's not a solid like we can see it.

It's not that kind of solid, but like, but it moves. It's like a flowing solid. And that's what they were saying is it like has the potential to change speeds for everything. Yeah. Like there was an article they were talking about or this week. They were already saying that they're already developing technology engine tech to get to Mars sooner.

And if they have this to electricity, yeah. Yeah. That could be, because a lot of, I mean, even the most promising sci-fi is like six months. You know, six months is going to take you to get there. You have to spend all this time in space. It's a three-year mission. You're spending all this time in space. Was it, if we can speed that up, that drastically changes.

everything if we can if we can even move close to the speed of light through super solid photo whatever the fuck it is it means we can get to planets in hours yeah he's at most like we don't this isn't like we're going to get light speed or warp speed like eff that nonsense that is something that may not even exist who knows but the fact that we can get close to it yeah it's fucking weird it's crazy and then that brings up the implications of what happens when you do do that right because the closer you get to light just like with the black like if you saw interstellar you know how that works if you hit mars how long actually went by i didn't see the movie well just if you hit a black hole in time slow like time dilations like there's just implications

like we don't know it almost stops yeah but for everyone else it doesn't no so if you're going the speed like like all the great stories about speed of light is if you travel the speed of light wherever you're going when you come back time is different you haven't aged all that much but everyone else has and so there's a lot of questions i don't have any answers i don't know how any of it truly works but it's fascinating to talk about and think about because like we're like this we're this close to really cracking something here did you ever did you ever think we'd actually live to see this aspect of science kind of cracked honestly i kind of wish like in the 50s i kind of wish we were still at that like jets and flying cars robots like there was a hope like a hopefulness to

atomic the atomic zero point energy future that we never got there's like there's like a hopefulness to it like where the future's fun and every like flying cars and flies now it's either we're going full cyberpunk or we're just want to space chicken that doesn't fucking kill me when i eat it how about that yeah like you know basic basic amenities that we've had for 200 years that aren't suddenly poisoned possible we have a measles outbreak in texas while ai and cool and super solid light is existing i'll tell you why it's popular well it's possible it starts with the sea and ends in ism and has a it starts like there's a capital in there somewhere it's certainly part of the definition of the name is to conserve and never rest my brain i'm thinking yeah no stop that stop that sorry sorry yeah all right go ahead take it away you got jesse do you have something interesting also space related a little bit so this i thought was just an article that happened, and it gave big, I don't know if Mathis has seen this vibes, but the U.S. government announced that the secret X-37B spaceplane returned to Earth after a 434-day mission in orbit, according to Space Force, which, by the way, I forgot

existed. Yeah, me too. Although the details remained mysterious, the uncrewed spacecraft is said to have started its exciting chapter for the X-37B program. Mission 7 broke new ground by showcasing X37B's ability to flexibly accomplish its test and experimentation objectives across orbital regimes. Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman said in the Space Force statement, in particular, the Space Force noted the space plane's successful completion of several

arrow-breaking maneuvers, a method of utilizing atmospheric drag to lower the plane's orbit while expending minimal amounts of fuel. I'm just going to read you what it says here because I don't know how this works. Typically, satellites must be built, must use built-in thrusters to change their altitude. By arrow-breaking, the space plane instead changes the angle of its nose relative to its orbital direction, thus exposing more of its broad underbelly to the atmosphere. This in turn generates drag on the plane, gradually slowing it down and lowering its altitude

over the course of multiple passes around the planet. During the mission, the autonomous space plane also carried out various experiments related to space radiation and space domain awareness technology, which presumably refers to

detecting various objects in orbit, according to the statement. Space Force representatives did not elaborate on what these experiments entailed. The plane returned to Vandenberg in the dark of night March 7th, 2025. Interesting.

That screams Mathis story to me. I'm just saying. He's like, I know the UFO setting that you're referring to. I'm just saying. It's an interesting cover story. I will always say, if these things are visiting us,

it is not because we're special. It is not because we're anything. It's because we're probably a fucking wildlife reserve of like, leave the angry, like, ape race alone with explosive metals. Let's just watch them from a, far and maybe talk to some of the nice ones that live in the woods or something.

You know what I mean? One of my absolute favorite short stories and I do not remember the name, which is a shame. But it's about an alien race discovering mankind. But it's seen through their eyes and it's written in the form of a journal of an alien watching us. And one of my favorite parts of it is literally they're just like,

we don't know what to think about them. They seem dangerous. We keep our distance. But we watch as they strap they strap rock. They strap like combustion or whatever they said, they, you know, they, they strap fire to their backs and launched themselves into orbit. And it made me realize, like, how truly insane that is.

Dude, I think about that all the time, like, just like, when everybody's like, well, what the, what kind of technology to be so much better than ours? I'm like, we are still literally exploding things in small metal, like, containers to, like, to like, micro explosions. Yeah, everything we do is based on blowing something up. I'm like there has to be we are discovering quantum science there had to have been it always had to have been a better way of doing the shit but capitalism rules and I kind of come back to that yeah but like it truly feels like yeah it's like I don't I think it's a silly thing to say I'm like because we're we it's impressive that we are launching ourselves into space by exploding things and only killing ourselves some of the time but I mean that's like the

point of the short story that I love is they're just watching they're like Like, where the, the, like, the story itself has like a moral and a fun ending. But like, the vast majority of it is this person watching us being like, I don't know what to say. If I report back, like, they won't believe me. Like, they scare, these people scare me. I watch them fight each other. I watched them, like, launch, like, they made nukes. We didn't even know you could do that, which I think is fast.

Because really, when you think about it, like, it's not necessary. Like, nuclear fusion and fission. It's not necessary for space travel. So the idea of them being like, we'd even know, like, we wouldn't have the balls to do that. And I was like, yeah, that sounds like humanity. It's a great, it's a great story. It's fun. It's like, yeah, a bunch of very angry, violent creatures somehow got smart.

Literally apes with rockets on their backs is the way we're just like. It's like, we somehow are able to like create amazing things, but we can't shake. We're just territorial violent nature that drives. Of who we are, yeah. Some of those no man sky aliens that's on a planet that's like a hippo that has like bat wings and like farts like that's just it's weird about as random as that it sucks I got something speaking of random that's

just totally different than all that stuff adjacently related to ghost adventures the show that is you know kind of become a joke on this show but also kind of serious but also like squarely in the Chalubinati realm Aaron Goodwin we know this man

he's the kind of sweet hapless cameraman of the group yeah his wife Victoria Goodwin has been arrested in Nevada on suspicion of hiring someone to murder him. Whoa. Good God. According to online, yeah, according to online inmate records, she was arraigned on charges of solicitation of murder and conspiracy murder.

She has a $100,000 bail, cash a bond and her first hearing is on the 25th. And basically what happened is back in October, she was sending. messages to an inmate in a prison in Florida about getting out of her marriage which down in the Coral Castle prison in Florida she found out about this guy by seeing him

on a true crime show and she set aside $11,000 gave the inmate information about him because he's on a ghost adventure shoot right now in this time period in February he was in California

and the inmate contacted somebody else in California that he had a text that's like he's asleep in the hotel room right now I need to know what's going on can I get an update? Was it done? And the wife was asking

if the inmate if she thought he was a bad if he thought she was a bad person because she chose to end his existence instead of divorce and she said she was anxious because it was happening. Yes, she's a terrible, terrible, terrible person. And so I guess it was in Barstow where they were.

And so the idea was that the inmate in jail was going to call the hotel room and distract him so that he could the guy who was there could pop in and kill him and uh police found out about it there was a 2,500 up front paid uh they because they seized his phone when in jail and when they talked to her she said that she had only been fantasizing about killing her husband with him and did not remember sending the messages or whatever uh apparently though Aaron Goodwin completely blindsided by this he thought Marys was doing fine. They got married three years ago.

On February 27th, which was not that long ago, she posted a picture of them in a cuddle puddle on a couch with their cat. And yeah, everybody's just reaching out to Aaron and being like, dude,

this is crazy. If you're having a bad day or you have a bad relationship, you're at home, and the thought pops into your head, maybe I should just kill him. Just leave. Just take five.

It's better even if you just leave wordlessly and never come back. It's a better choice. Let's take five. Leave. Yeah, I genuinely don't. Like, you have, there has to be something wrong. Like, the average person does not think this relationship's so bad, I have to kill that person.

Sociopath. Absolutely sociopathic. Yeah. Yeah, that is a whole. No normal person watches a true crime show and go, I need that guy. I need him. Oh, a guy who gets in trouble for trying to kill people's spouses. he's a real man i gotta get this guy if we've learned anything every one of these plans always fails

like even if you kill the dude you're still end up in jail you're gonna be a suspect like you're already like a fucking hundred millionaire you're not even close to getting away with murder yeah yeah like the first person they look at in a murder is always the spouse every time absolutely correct so like there's no there's not even using your brain in this i don't i would love to know the backstory of those two. I wonder if she married him because he was on TV, not because she actually cared about him. You know what I mean? I mean, she's very, very possible. And even though he was a big, bad, mean man, he's hot. I mean, people be wild. People be wild. People be wild. People do be wild. People do be wild. And we're going to go be wild. Oh, I'm going to go

by ourselves. Yeah, we're going to go be wild by ourselves. I'm going to go like a sandwich. That's pretty wild. I'm going to have enchiladas is what I'm going to have. Oh. I'm going to go. That is wild. Yeah, I'm wild. I think I'm a honey mustard chicken and some green beans tonight. That sounds good too. Hell yeah.

God damn. All right. Thank you guys so much for support to see our Patreon. com slash true, my potter listening wherever you're listening. We appreciate what you'll love you. We'll be next week. Bye.

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