Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can particles travel faster than light?

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

Is there any way particles can travel faster than light or is it against the laws of physics? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind someone. of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, what happens if you break a law of physics?

Is this a hypothetical question? And are you like looking for physics legal advice? Well, I mean, I'm not saying I'm building a faster-than-light black hole machine in my backguard. I'm just, you know, just hypothetically, what would happen to me legally if I broke a law of physics? Well, speaking for physics, as a spokesperson for physics, physics tends to be pretty unforgiving. You just can't break the laws. Oh, you mean I can't go to physics jail or get a physics fine? We have a black hole we throw all those people into.

I see that. That is physics, too. Yeah, as your physics lawyer, I advise you not to break any laws of physics. Hi, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist. and I'm always looking for ways to accomplish what we need to without breaking the laws of physics. And together with the authors of the book, we have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe,

now translated to over 23 languages. I just finished the Ukrainian version. It's awesome. Oh, yeah? Were the jokes as funny in Ukrainian or maybe more funny? There's sort of a dry sense of humor there, you know, in Ukrainian. It's a different culture or different language. No, I have no idea, really.

I have no idea. How somebody translates our sort of silly sense of humor into Korean or Ukrainian. But hey, they've done it. I'm sure there's a word for fart in all of those languages. Yeah, well, that's a question. Which country has the most words for farts? That tells you something about the culture, right? Right, Twitter, get on it.

We challenge you. But that book tells you not just about how to say farts in Korean and Polish, but also about the mysteries of the universe and how so many of them are left unsolved. So many of them that maybe you or your kids or your grandkids might be the one to reveal something fascinating and mind-blowing and basic about the universe we find ourselves in. Yeah, amazing questions, some of which we tackle here in our podcast. So welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we explore all the unknowns and the knowns about the universe, the known, known, unknowns, the unknown unknowns, the unknown unknowns, the unknown unknowns, and the known unknowns for the complete matrix of knowniness. I don't know about that, man.

But yeah, we talk about how it all works. And specifically, I guess, we talk about what you can and cannot do in the universe. Yeah, physics sort of works in both directions. On one hand, we're looking around the universe and trying to figure out, what are the rules? You know, this happens and that doesn't happen. Why doesn't that ever happen? How can we never see anything break this rule? I guess it's a fundamental rule of the universe.

But it also goes the other way where we're like, well, given these rules, How do we accomplish what we want to, you know? How do we get to Alpha Centaur, you know, a reasonable amount of time? How do we get enough energy to fuel all the demands of humanity? So it sort of works in both directions. Yeah. Where's that warp drive? I'm still waiting for my flying car and the teleporter and the warp drive.

I think warp drives might actually come before flying cars. Really? Yeah. Well, warp drives, you know, theoretically solved. And there's some practical problems there. We talked about on our podcast, you know, like, you know, do you eat the entire mass? of Jupiter in order to accomplish one trip. But hey, it's just an engineering problem.

I see. I see theoretically, we have warp drives. We totally do. But practically, practically we're not there yet. We're not there yet. But I think flying cars are harder because it's not just an engineering problem. It's like a sociological problem. Like, you know, you turn left, you turn right, you turn up, you know.

Everybody has to learn how to drive those things. It's going to be a nightmare. Who wants flying cars? Who wants to be stuck in three-dimensional traffic? Maybe we should only get flying cars after we get self-driving cars, so we can get self-driving flying cars. I can't tell if that's the best idea or the worst idea I've ever had. Yeah, we'll say it's a theoretically good idea and then leave it to the engineers.

Something I've always wanted to do is visit other star systems and walk on the surface of other planets. But of course, these planets are all so far away that given the limitation of the speed of light, it would take you forever to get there. Right, yeah. I mean, it's a huge and amazing universe with probably, incredible and mind-blowing things to see. But they're all really far away, right? The nearest star is at least, what, three light years away?

Yeah, Proxima Centauri is more than three light years away. And our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. And the nearest galaxy is much, much further away. So you might think that makes the universe inaccessible. But your physics lawyer will provide a physics loophole. Yeah, in the contract of the universe. Is that where the loophole is or in the laws written? Yeah, if you want to accomplish something and there's a law that's sort of stopping you,

you got to think to yourself, do I really need to break this law or is there another way to get there? And so in the case of warp drives, it's a really elegant solution. It says, you know, nothing can move through space faster than light. All right, well, then don't move through space. Just bend space. So it's not actually so far away. It's a good, it's a really, it's a beautiful sort of example of how do we think differently. So you're not breaking the rules, but you're getting what you want.

If Mohammed can't come to Alpha Centauri, have Alpha Centauri come to Muhammad. That's right. And so there are loopholes in physics and ways in which there's sort of an unbreakable law. But if you think about it a little bit, there are maybe ways that you can work around it, right? Yeah, precisely. And this one, nothing can travel faster than light. This one's pretty susceptible to loopholes. Really?

It's a fraud law. It's not well-written. Yeah, the guys who drafted it initially, they should have thought about all the clauses and the end of the addendums and the various scenarios. Clearly it was written by physicists, not lawyers. And now it's physicists that are helping us get around it. And especially particle physics,

because we talked in the podcast before about particles that move faster than the speed of light, like tachions. But there's another thing you can do. You can actually get normal everyday particles like electrons and muons going faster than light. It feels like you're saying something profane or something heretical. Yeah, I sort of like that. I'm sort of like, you know, tossing a challenge in the face of the universe.

Like, you think you got this law? Watch this. Watch me go faster. That's right. I'm going to break this rule right in front of you. Yeah, so today on the program, we'll be tackling the topic. How particles can go faster than light. Today's topic is not a question for.

the first time. Usually we have a question as the title of the episode, but today, it's a statement. That's right. We are standing up for particles and say, you can't tell them what to do, particles. Yeah, and it's a prescripted title, too, right? I guess we're going to explain how particles can go faster than light. Yes, we certainly are. We're going to explain how it happens and how it works. And also, we're going to answer some other lingering questions in your mind, like why are nuclear power plants always shown as glowing blue in the movies? Because green means they're ghosts, I guess. I was wondering what you're going to say there is from the artistic science point of view.

Yeah, different colors mean different things. Yeah. Red is danger. Right, great. Green is, green is ghosts from ghostbusters. Oh, I thought green was envy, but, and I always thought blue was sort of like cold. You know, things are like ice blue, but, you know, power plants, these nuclear power plants, they're always glowing blue. I've actually seen it myself in real life.

have a nuclear power plant under the chemistry building here at UC Irvine. Wait, they do glow blue? You're not kidding? I'm not kidding, man. This is a science podcast. We don't just make stuff up. I think we're talking about movies. You were saying, in real life, nuclear power plants glow blue? In real life, nuclear power plants glow blue. It's not just Dr. Manhattan. It's real. I've seen it with my own eyeballs. Oh, man. And you're still alive, alive. Well, this AI simulation of me that does the podcast with you, it's still alive. I'll I'm blud myself to the cloud.

It's in case in radiation-proof skin. I am, Dr. Manhattan, it turns out. That's the ultimate twist at the end of Watchman. All this time. Oh, my goodness. You could have just made everything, all these episodes appear out of nowhere. Oh, wow. Can Dr. Manhattan have a podcast?

That would be amazing. It would probably be a little disorienting. Well, he doesn't seem to have a great sense of humor. You know, I figure he's all powerful. Why can't he think of a joke? Because he already knows the answer. Oh, so an element of comedy is surprised. So if you know the future.

Yeah, Dr. Manhattan, of course, those of you haven't seen it from the show, Watchman, and the, of course, graphic novel, Watchman. But so glowing blue is a thing related to physics and nuclear power plants. And so that's what we'll get into today. That's right. And the technical name for what we're going to explain today is called Charenkoff radiation, named for, I guess, Bob Charingoff or Sam Turingoff or Sally Turingoff, whoever discovered it.

Probably Uri, maybe, or Sasha? Most likely. More likely. Uri Cherenkov, yes. And so I walked around campus here at UC Irvine and I asked people if they had heard of Cherenkov radiation and if they thought particles could move faster than the speed of light. So think about it for a second and ask yourself if someone asked you if you knew what Churinkov radiation was and if particles can go faster than light, what would you answer?

Here's what they had to say. Have you heard of Charenkoff radiation? No, I haven't. Do you think any particles can travel faster than light? I don't know if this is accurate, but I think, like, Einstein or someone, like, said that it isn't possible to travel faster than light. No, I have no idea. Maybe? I think it depends, like, how small they are. And, like, I don't really know too much about, like, the smallest particles or anything.

So I think it could be possible. No. I'm don't really sure what's the name of it. we say that it's two particles that's so small but they can contact each other in a really far away distance

maybe even faster than the light at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. You think so? Yeah. I believe so, but I couldn't defend that answer. Okay. Awesome. No, why not? Because isn't the speed of light

the fastest thing? All right, a lot of pretty good law-abiding citizens answered your question. Nobody thought you can break this law of physics. No, some people did. Some people said, well, it depends how small they are.

That's my favorite one. Like, do you get small enough, then the laws don't apply or something? I see. If the light is small enough, like if the light, if you're small enough or if the light is small enough? If the particles are small enough,

I'm thinking, you know, there's like some minimum size for things these rules apply for. Like, you know, if you're smaller than one femtometer, then these rules apply. And that makes some sense, If you're like half of a point particle in size, then you can maybe go faster, right.

Yeah, and other folks, you know, some in quantum mechanics, you know, maybe it's quantum magic, something, something, something. Oh, I see. Because it does seem in quantum physics, there are, you guys do use sports like teleportation sometimes or, you know, sort of like going across some barrier or, right, or information traveling faster than light. We do sort of do things that seem impossible. using quantum mechanics, though we never send information faster than the speed of light. And, you know, we do attach quantum to things that don't really make sense. Like we talked about quantum Cheetos on the podcast last time. Did we?

Did we know? Was that just a dream? Flaming hot dream, yeah. All right, let's not talk about Daniel's flaming hot dreams. Yeah, so let's talk about how particles can go faster than light. So you're saying it's kind of a loophole in the laws of physics? Yeah, you have to be really careful about how you read these rules so you know exactly what it applies to. The law says nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum.

I feel like that's where the maybe the caveat is, in a vacuum. Yes, in a vacuum. And so the key thing to understand there is that it's not nothing can ever move faster than a photon moves, which is the common interpretation, right? Like light always wins a race. It's that there is a maximum speed limit to the universe, and that maximum speed limit is the speed that light travels when it's in a vacuum. Right.

And a vacuum in this case, obviously it's not a carpet vacuum. Are we talking about space? Are we talking about non-space? Are we talking about emptiness? Oh, man. That's a whole 45-minute digression there. But, yeah, we're sort of talking about empty space. As empty as space can get, right?

Like nothing but space. Nothing but space. Space always has quantum fields in it. A particle can't move through space if it didn't have quantum fields in it because a particle is just a ripple in the quantum fields. But as empty as space can get, that's how light can travel the fastest. But it's not really about light. You know, we call it the speed of light because in a vacuum, that's how fast light goes.

But it's really the speed of information in the universe. The speed out which anything can travel, not just light, but just anything in space. That's right. It's the top speed for information, which means it's the fastest that ripples can move through quantum fields, which mean that particles, which are ripples in those fields, can never move faster than that speed. Now, lots of particles move slower than that speed, right? Or massive particles can be at rest. But it's sort of more about the speed limit of the universe and not about the photons themselves.

And it's sort of not just particles, right? Like gravity can't travel faster than light either. That's why we have gravitational waves. That's right, gravitational information. Like if you deleted the sun from the universe, not something I recommend. then we would still feel its gravity for eight minutes. Eight minutes later, we would feel the lack of the sun. Yeah, precisely.

And so it's because information takes time to propagate through the universe. And that's all about the fields, right? What happens if you delete the sun from the universe? Well, the gravitational field of the sun sort of snaps back into flatness, but that snapping takes time to propagate through the field. There's no instantaneous transmission of information. So it's really about information as transmitted through quantum fields. That's the fundamental limitation.

And everything else just sort of falls out of that. So that's the law. The law says nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum. So then where's the loophole? Well, the loophole is that if you could somehow slow down light, then you could move faster than light. As long as both of you are under the speed limit of the universe. If you can slow down your opponent, then you can beat your opponent.

You only have to run faster than your friend when the bear is chasing you kind of situation. No, but if the goal is to move faster than light, then, yeah, all you need to do is somehow slow down light. If your goal is to move faster than the speed of light does in a vacuum, yeah, that's impossible. Oh, I see. It's possible to go faster than light, quote unquote, but maybe it's not possible to go faster than the fastest that light can go. Precisely. And so it's sort of a legalistic answer. answer, right? Can you go fast in light? Oh, yeah, sure. I just slow light down and then I can

easily stroll past photons. So it depends on what you wanted to do. If you wanted to move faster than light does in a vacuum, if you wanted to get to Alpha Centauri in two seconds, that might not be possible if you have to move through space. But if you want to have the experience of having your particles beat photons in a race, that is possible. All right. To me, that doesn't sound like it's super easy to do, but it sounds like maybe it is pretty easy to do. So let's get into how we can slow light down so we can beat it and what that means for nuclear reactors. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m. Everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a... a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriends professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this

My boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated? repeated with his professor or not. To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brand-Brandford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post

or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstyles play in our communities, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so newsflash, while we were on break, you liked up Cherenkov's first name. So what's his first name?

Yeah, so it's not Yuri Cherenkov or Sally Turincoff. It's Pavel Cherenkov, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1958 for explaining this amazing phenomena, how particles give off this crazy blue glow when they do beat photons in a race. Did he know why it was, I guess that's why he got the Nobel Prize, but did he know sort of the implications of it? Yeah, I mean, this is the kind of thing that he predicted and understood and then it was observed, and so they give the Nobel Prize when you sort of understand something that actually happens in the universe. Let's talk about how particles can go faster than light, which apparently they can. So there's a loophole in the lots of physics that say you can go faster than light. You can beat light under certain conditions. That's right.

And those conditions are that you make light go slower. And you're probably thinking, hold on a second, how could light go slower? Light is made of photons, and photons have no mass, and everything that has no mass has to move at the speed of light. Because otherwise, you could catch up to it and be hanging out with it. But like photons have no mass, so what happens if you catch up to them, then they're nothing, right? Light is also this funny thing because a lot of relativity, right, depends on this idea that light can always travels at the same speed no matter how fast you're going or how you're looking at it. Yeah, this is an amazing principle in special relativity that says everybody who measures the speed of light, even the same light, always gets the same answer regardless of how fast they're moving relative to each other. So if I'm shining a flashlight and I measure the speed of those photons,

then of course I get the speed of light. But if I'm standing on a train that's going half the speed of light and you're on the ground and you measure the light coming out of my photons, you don't get 1.5 times a speed of light. You still just get the speed of light. And somebody coming in the other direction measures it, it still gets the speed of light. And that's where all the crazy effects come from in relativity.

But you're saying that it is possible to slow light down. So how does that happen? Well, it's going to be another sort of legalistic answer, right? So it's true that photons always move at the speed of light in a vacuum, but when they're in a material, a material you think of as sort of like a collection of atoms or molecules. Like when it's moving through something, not just empty space. Yeah, and those things slow it down. It's like walking across an empty room versus walking across a room with a bunch of your friends

in it. Every time you take a step, you're going to interact with one of those molecules, one of your friends and say, hey, Jorge, how's it going? And you're going to have to respond to them. And it's going to slow you down, right? That's why I don't have any friends. I just like to get to where I'm going. I find that it's the most efficient way to live your life, is to not interact with humanity. Yeah. And then, but it's kind of like Usain Bold on a track can go really fast, but Usain Bold going through a crowded room full of Daniel's friends, it would take him a longer. Yeah, precisely. So the photon, you can imagine it moving through this material and it interacts with

those atoms. And so in some sense, it's getting absorbed and re-emitted or at the very least getting deflected by these electrons. And so it's not just moving through the material in a straight line. It's either getting absorbed and re-emitted or deflected sort of back and forth a little bit. And then its effective speed is slower than the speed of light. So you can think that between its interaction with atoms, it's still moving at the speed of light in the vacuum. But you have to factor in the time it takes to get absorbed by the electron, to get re-emitted, or you have to to think about this sort of effective path length, if you're going up and down because you're interacting with the electrons and the nuclear fields, then you're sort of getting pushed in the

wrong direction a little bit, and so your effective speed is going to be a little slower. It takes more time to get through like a pane of glass than it would to get through the same distance in vacuum. Light takes longer to go through glass than it does through water or air. Light takes longer to go through water, air, or glass than it does to get through a vacuum. And every material has, you know, some number, we call this the index of refraction that tells you sort of how much light is slowed down. I guess my question is, if it's getting absorbed and re-emitted, is it still the same light? That is a question for the philosophy department, my friend. It mostly is the same photon. It has the same, roughly the same direction and carries a lot

of the same information. But if a photon is absorbed and remitted, is it the same photon? We talked about that on the podcast when we were talking about like the age of the electrons in your body. If they don't interact, then it's the same one. If they interact, is it really still the same one? Well, you know, every particle is interacting with quantum virtual particles, even in the vacuum. And so from that point of view, like, particle never lives for more than 10 to the minus 25 seconds. And so no particle is the same as it was before. But effectively, yeah, I mean, if you shine a beam of light through glass,

you're thinking of the same beam that's coming out the other side. So really what you're interested in is measuring, like, the velocity through the pane of glass. Okay, so then if I should, some light into glass, it's going to slow down. And so that's one way that you can beat light. You can run outside of the glass. Oh, you could run on the side of glass, but some particles don't interact with the material. Like you send a muon through a block of ice. It doesn't interact with the material as much as a photon does. So the photon gets slowed down, but the muon is sort of standoffish. It's like walking through a room of your friends and ignoring all of them.

Particle like the muon can go through glass and it doesn't stop as much as a photon. because I guess the particles don't like it or... It all depends on the interactions, yeah. The photon is slowed down because it interacts with those atoms. The photon is a photon, it interacts with everything that has charge, and that means atomic nuclei and atomic electrons. But a muon is heavier, and that mass prevents it from interacting as much because the rate of interaction there is dependent on the mass.

And so it helps to sort of ignore those particles. And, you know, other particles like neutrinos, they don't even feel electromagnetic interactions. So they fly through this stuff and they hardly even get slowed down at all. It's like it just bulldozes through the crowd. Yeah, it feels like it's not even really there. Yeah, and so your speed through material

depends on how much you interact with that material. And if photons interact more than your particle does, then photons will get slowed down more than your particle does, and your particle will win. It will come down the other side of that material faster earlier than the other photon. Do meos always go at the speed of light? Muans cannot go at the speed of light, no, because no particle that has mass can go at the speed of light, but they can go really fast. They can go 0.999C or something like that.

I see if you accelerate a muon enough and then stuck in a piece of glass with a photon, the muon would win. Yeah. If you shoot a muon gun at 0.999C and you have a laser next to it, then the muon's going to come outside a piece of glass faster than the laser would. Good for the muon. And electrons do this also. And electron can go faster than light too. Yeah, electrons can go faster than light as well. And that's actually what gives you the blue glow. And when particles do go faster than light, then they have this really crazy effect called Terenkoff radiation.

And it was actually Terenkoff. He saw this blue glow and then he used this idea to explain it. Nobody understood like, why is this stuff glowing blue in these early nuclear experiments? And he's the one who came up with this explanation that maybe they're glowing blue because they're going fast. in the speed of light, and he worked out all the math, and he showed why it happens. But wait, what did he actually see? Like, what was in front of him? Was it a radioactive material, or was it just light going through glass?

But what was the thing that he actually noticed? Well, what they were doing is they had a bottle of water, and they were shooting it with radiation, right? This is in the early days in the 30s, before we really understood nuclear physics as well as we do now. And they were just shooting it with particles, and they saw this blue, blue, light come out. And, you know, they didn't understand what caused it. Now, of course, we understand that it was triggering other radioactive processes in the water and some of those shoot out electrons that move through the water faster than the light can. And then it gives off this blue glow, which is one of my favorite things in physics. You mean radiation? Well, radiation is pretty

awesome. Or just the color blue. No, and it's a nice blue, but this blue glow comes from a special effect, and it's sort of similar to a sonic boom. All right, let's get into this sonic boom, but with light, and let's get into what actually happens when you go faster than light. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight

that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week. on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are.

your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session. 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, Daniel, so it is possible to beat light and go faster than light, but only if you go through a material that slows light down. and it only has you used something that doesn't get slowed down by the glass. And you're saying that's where this sharenko variation comes from. Yeah, I think about it like a boat on a lake. If you just dropped a rock into a lake, then what happens, you get ripples. And the ripples move out from the rock. But if you drop a series of rocks, then you get a series of ripples. Now imagine you're dropping a series of rocks, but you're moving faster than the ripples.

Then you end up with this wake, like behind the boat, for example. That's why if you drive a boat quickly, you get a wake behind the boat because you're moving faster than the waves that are being made by your boat, and they're building up. They're building up on top of each other. And you're saying that happens with light? Yeah, and the same thing happens in the air. If you move faster than the speed of sound, you get a sonic boom. It's like a wake in the air. All those sounds are adding up together to make you this one big wave.

So all the noise of the airplane from one second ago and two seconds ago and five, seconds ago is all arriving at the same time because it's moving faster than the sound it's making. Like it's moving faster than the light can get out of your way and so you sort of accumulate a whole bunch of air in front of you. That's kind of what the sonic boom is. That's what the sonic boom is and you hear it when that wake washes over you if you're on the surface. Now the cool thing is if you move faster than light, then you're moving faster than the image that you make. Okay, so this is like an optic boom. Yeah, it's like a luminal bloom. I don't know. You should come up with a name for it, but it's a really cool. How about a light boom? That sounds like something

you'd use well in a production of a movie. So I guess paint me through this. So I'm a muon or some other radio active particle and I'm moving through glass and I'm moving faster than light. Yeah. So any light that you emit, you are leaving it behind. And then if in a second later, you emit more light, you're also leaving that behind. So now the light is sort of spreading out behind you just the way a boat would when it's moving across the surface of a lake, but you're moving faster than the light you're making. And so just the same way a boat makes a wake or an airplane going fast in the speed of sound

makes a sonic boom, which is just a wake in the air. You are making a wake of light. Wait, I guess I'm not quite sure understanding. I'm understanding. So let's say I wasn't going faster than light. So I'm a muon, I'm going through glass slowly. I hit a piece of glass and I emit a photon, right?

That's kind of what happens. And so the photon just flies up in front of me or what? Yeah, if you're moving slower than light, like most of us do most days, then any image you make, any light that you emit leaves you and you don't catch up to it, right? Right. It's gone in front of me and it's gone behind me. You emit light in all directions, right? You're not like a black hole on one side.

And so muons are similar. They can emit light in any directions. And when they move to a medium, they tend to radiate a little bit. Oh, okay. And they emit light sort of in every direction. So imagine like circular wavefront leaving this muon. Those are photons shot out in every direction from the muon. But now the muon overtakes the ones that were going in the direction.

It was going. And it makes another wavefront leaving it. So this is like dropping another rock in the lake. And that one adds up to the photons it made previously. And but then it catches up to those and passes those and makes another one. And so add these ripples get larger and larger. they add up to this wavefront, and that wavefront is the luminal bloom, or whatever you want to call it, this wake in light that it's making.

And that is the blue glow. And because of the way they add up and because the muon is going so fast, it tends to happen more often at bluer frequencies. And so it actually emits churin koff radiation at a whole spectrum of frequencies. You just mostly see the blue part because it happens more often in the blue range. And so that's what Turenkoff radiation is. Trenkaf radiation is really like the sonic boom for light. And that's what you're seeing when you look at a nuclear reactor,

you're seeing electrons that are like kicked off from radioactive decay or from nuclear reactions going faster than light can in that water or in that material that they're sitting in. Oh, because they're getting kicked out really fast. They're getting kicked out really fast. Faster than light can go through whatever material they're sitting in. Oh, I see. But normal electrons, like if I just run a current source, through some water,

not recommended in your bathtub, but if I just cost it short in like a body of water, I wouldn't get this blue glow, would I? Yeah, you need the electrons to be going really fast. And the same way, if you took those same really fast electrons and you teleported them into space, you had that

reaction happen in space, you wouldn't get the blue glow because the blue glow only comes from beating the speed of those photons in that material. And so in a vacuum, you can't beat the speed of those materials because in these nuclear reactions, they usually have these fuel rods embedded in some material to capture the energy, et cetera, to cool it, then the electrons can go faster than the photons do through

that cooling material, which is usually some special kind of water. Because in that nuclear reactor, the electrons are shooting off really, really fast, which is causing then the... In fact, that's what the water is for, right? It's to slow down the electrons coming off. I think so, yeah. It gathers the energy from the neutron. and the electrons that fly off.

And also, I think it keeps the fuel rods from getting too hot and going critical, you know, from my extensive research in watching Chernobyl. From your extensive research watching Watchmen and Dr. Manhattan, you can conclude that it is possible for a god

to fall in love with a woman. That's right. And, you know, it really is true in real life that nuclear reactors glow blue. And I think that's why people associate that color with nuclear reactions. And that's probably why the artist for Watchmen made Dr. Manhattan glow blue.

Interesting. And you've seen this with your own eyes. You saw like the tub of water glowing blue? Yeah, you can go down the basement of one of the chemistry buildings here at UC Irvine where they have a working nuclear reactor and you can just look at it and it glows blue. Anyone from the street can just walk into a nuclear reactor. Tell them Daniel White's incendiary. Dipped their toes into the blue water. That sounds totally safe.

No, you can't just go down there. You have to arrange a tour and it's limited to, I think, students and the same. The SPS here at UCI, which is awesome. It arranged as a tour of the nuclear reactor every year for the physics grad students and undergrads. And so I tagged along one time. All right. So that's pretty cool that we can beat light in a foot race, I guess, if you're inside of a material. And so that's pretty good bragging rights.

And also, it's nice to just flaunt the loss of physics, right? Does that feel good? It does. It does feel good to say, you thought you could limit us. You thought you could crack down on us and keep us from getting what we want. humanity can outlawyer you, universe. We have better lawyers than you. It's like when your parents said, you know,

no more than two cookies, and then you eat ice cream instead, and you say, well, you didn't say anything about ice cream. I'm sure your parents love it, just like the universe. That's a hypothetical situation. All right, so then what is it besides sort of a nice blue glow

and sort of bragging rights, what can we use this effect for? Is it useful for anything? Yeah, there are experiments that are looking for really high energy neutrinos coming from like other galaxies or who knows what and they pass through the earth so use the entire earth as a detector and as they're passing through the earth they emit a muon they turn into a muon and what we want to do is capture that muon and in order to do that you need a really large detector you need like a cubic mile of detector in order to measure the speed of these things

so what they do is they use a cubic mile of ice they go down to antarctica where there's like miles and miles of ice and they embed camera. They drill these crazy long, mile long holes and they drop down a string of cameras and then they just pour water over it and it freezes up and they never see them again. But they have a one mile cube.

It's like a hugest ice cube and they have all these strings of cameras drill down into it and they see muons coming up from inside the earth and emitting Charenkoff radiation inside the ice. What? What? Like they'll see a flash? They'll see a flash or they'll see the ice glow?

They see this ring, right? Because Trincoff radiation is like a sonic boom. It comes off in this circle. So you see this ring of blue come through the ice. And you can use that to measure the direction of the muon and its speed. You're saying these come from neutrinos that create the muons? The neutrinos come from who knows where. And then they pass through the earth.

They're sort of like upwards going through the earth. And then in the earth, they make these muons. And then we see the muons in the ice. this charenka of radiation because these are going then faster than light. Yeah, they're really high energy muons and they're going faster than light does in the ice and they make these crazy blue glow.

And so this is a technique we use in particle physics all the time to spot really fast particles because they make this special radiation and the angle of the light that comes off them tells you exactly the velocity of the particle. Because you can tell how fast it's going by

when it hits different cameras. Like you actually see an image of it? Yeah, you can see an image. You can see the circle that it emits. And you know the particle was going right through the center of the circle. It emits this cone of blue light. And the angle of that cone tells you the velocity of the particle. And of course, the particle went through the center so you know the direction.

And so you get these awesome 3D images. And I just love the idea of like drilling down a mile into ice and dropping cameras into it. Makes you feel better about dropping your iPhone in your toilet. That's right. Scientists have done much, much worse. Yeah, that's a pretty cool experiment. We should maybe get into Antarctic science. It seems like they do a lot down there.

And you can actually even see Charingerf radiation with your own eyes. Do I have to be a mile down into the Antarctic ice? You don't. You just have to get lucky because the material in your eyeballs also has the same property. Photons go through it slower than high energy particles. So if a muon passes through this vitreous humor, this goop that's inside your eyeball, you will see a flash of blue. Really? If a muon, if a fast-moving muon goes into my eye, oh.

If I took a muon gun and I shot a beam of muons into your eyeballs, which I will not do, but you would see a blue glow in your eyes. You would be Dr. Manhattan, basically. Or you would look like Dr. Manhattan to me. That's right. That's exactly right. Please put on some clothes, Daniel. But I'm definitely that cut. I mean...

Yeah, at least those nice black shorts that he... Speedos that he wears. Yeah, so you can see Trenka of radiation with your own eyes. Now, it's not very common, but it can be done. Wow. I never thought about that. I guess the light that's hitting the back of my eye

is not going as fast as it could be. No, it's slowed down by the goop in your eyeballs. If your eyeballs had vacuums in them, that you'd see things a tiny bit sooner. Right, yeah. I'm getting an unnecessary delay in my information here. I feel like there's a startup idea somewhere there. Get your burrito a tiny bit faster.

That's right. Watch your Netflix shows a little bit faster, technically, by inserting this vacuum in your eyeball. It's a good thing this is not a medical advice show. Right. And everything will look. That's blue also. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. All right. Well, that's a pretty interesting phenomenon, and it's pretty interesting to know that the loss of physics have loopholes. Like, who knows what else can have a loophole? That's right. So come by to Daniel Whiteson, physics attorney at law, and I will figure out how to accomplish what it is you want to get done without breaking any laws of physics. That's right. Go down to Whiteson, Whiteson, and Whiteson, LLP.

That's right. black hole immigration attorneys light particle physicists do you have an undocumented black hole in your backyard we can help you have you been in a physics accident even if you were at fault we will speculate about the causality

there was a delay how the light got to his eyeball it's not his fault it's a pre-existing condition of the universe that's right All right. Well, it's pretty cool. And who knows what other loopholes there are will discover in the future? That's right. This should inspire you because if there's something you want to get done in the universe and you thought it was impossible, there might be a way to work around the laws of physics.

All right. Thank you very much for joining us guys and gals out there. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. And if you're interested in asking us a question that you'd like to hear us answer on the podcast, please don't be shy. Send it to questions at Danielanhorpe.com. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. It's been a bombing. the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism.

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