Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The physics of shadows

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Daniel and Kelly shine a light on the mysterious every day physics of shadows, including whether they can move faster than light.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Find health stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, it's Daniel. I have a new book out now called Do Aliens Speak Physics about whether or not we have physics in common with aliens? I think it's a lot of fun, but here's a totally unbiased review from Phil Plate, author of Bad Astronomy.

Quote, Whiteson makes us think about how we think about aliens and how we think about the universe at a fundamental level and does it in a readable, understandable, and even funny way. If we ever meet aliens, the first thing we should do is give them this book. So go out and pick up a copy of Do Aliens Speak Physics? I think you'll enjoy it. When you see the U.S. universe through the lens of physics, you start to see physics everywhere. Why is glass transparent, but stone isn't? Why are bicycle stable? How do tornadoes start? The mysteries of physics aren't just out there in deep space. They're right here in front of us, raising questions and

demanding answers every day. Today, we'll tackle a topic that I've wondered about since I was a little baby physicist, looking at the world and wondering how it worked. All you need for this inspiration is a light bulb and your hands, with which you can make something out of nothing. Shadows aren't really anything. They're a lack of something. They're negative objects. But our minds see them as positive as a thing in the world rather than just the absence of light. And shadows have been surprising and confusing people for thousands of years. Today we'll dig into the physics of shadows and ask whether they can break one of physics's most hallowed principles.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary shadowy universe. Hello, I'm Kelly Waintersmith. I study parasites and space. And one of my absolute favorite things is when it's a clear night and it's a full moon and I'm out on the farm. and you can see the shadows of the trees and your own shadow in the middle of the night. It feels sort of like spooky but fantastic and I just absolutely love it.

I like shadows. Are those star shadows or moon shadows? No, it's just that there's so much sunlight reflecting off the moon and making it down, you know, to Earth that you can see, you know, the shadows of the trees. Wait, what did you ask me? Are they moon shadows? Yeah, they're moon shadows.

I'll call them moon shadows. Yeah, moon shadows are awesome. Yeah, I love them. Cool. Mm-hmm. As I was explaining it, I was like, there's no way Daniel doesn't understand where the light is coming from. Why am I explaining it to him? I must have missed the question.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I do understand why the moon is bright at night. Go ahead, Daniel. Why is the moon bright at night? Are you doubting me or you're putting me on the spot? Let's call his bluff. No, obviously, because the moon is being illuminated by the sun. just because we can't see the sun

doesn't mean that some parts of the moon can't see the sun. And I've never lived in an area where there was so little light pollution that I could see the shadows cast by the moon. Another reason why Virginia is amazing. So my question for you today, Daniel, so I was looking at the question asked by the listener

and I realized that faster than light questions sometimes just like make my brain go, oh, this is really not making sense to me. What physics concept that when you think about makes you think, I just, my brain can't really, I have to accept that this is true because the science is good, but my brain is just having trouble wrapping itself around this fact.

What confuses you about physics? Thermodynamics. Yeah, I've never really been a fan of statistical physics and thermodynamics because it verges on chemistry. It's like you start from all these micro states and these little particles, and then you zoom out and you draw these conclusions about the macroscopic state, but there's so many particles involved. And I don't know, it just feels like there's lots of approximations and considerations, and you never really feel like you're on solid footing. And when I showed up at Berkeley, they make you take this qualifying exam to see, like, how good is your physics? And I remember my advisor at the time, he was like, good students pass this exam on the first try.

And I was like, gulp. So I spent that whole summer before grad school studying, studying, studying, studying, and I spent most of it studying thermodynamics because I knew that was my weak spot. And this qualifying exam, it's terrifying. It's two eight-hour days. Right? So it's like a serious ordeal. It's like a marathon. This is right when you get there?

This isn't like two years in or something? Well, you can wait and take it after you've taken the grad school classes. But my advisor was like, the best students show up and pass it on the first try. And I was like, yikes, that's pressure. Yeah. But I lucked out in that year, no thermo questions. Just zero. So I was like, yeah, all right.

I'm going to skate on through. And did you? Did you pass it on the first time? I did pass it on the first try. And then I had to take a thermodynamics class. And I skated just over the minimum threshold for that class. Let me tell you. Nice.

But you did it. And now it's behind you. I did it. And I'm a certified physicist. And I don't have to do thermodynamics. You know, speaking of chemistry, last night, I was giving a talk to a women in chemistry group over Zoom. And halfway through, I realized that I was describing a chemistry thing. And I suddenly got really insecure because I was like, what if this is wrong?

Because I just pretend to know chemistry. Everybody pretends to know chemistry, even the chemists. And then I was like, well, what if any of them listen to the podcast and they know what I've said about chemistry? But, you know, I think it went okay in the end. I think it's important to admit our strengths and weaknesses. You know, that's part of being a scientist. But that's not the kind of stuff that just got me into physics. I wasn't always fascinated with concepts about temperature and pressure and this kind of stuff.

I remember as a kid thinking about light, you know, wondering like if I block the sun, if I put my hand in front of the sun, how does light get to that tree over there? And just thinking about like the way light moves. This is like six-year-old Daniel, like doing little experiments. And like obviously now it seems like a silly. the experiment, the light can get to the tree even if my hand is blocking the light from my face. But you don't know until you do the experiment, right? And so, anyways, I've always been super fascinated by light and by shadows. Well, let's not leave our listeners in the shadows. Let's jump into today's topic. See, I did it this time. Not very nice. I was trying

to get us there. Today's episode is inspired by a question from a listener who asked if we could do a whole episode on shadows. And specifically, they were wondering about three scenarios. One, where you're standing in the shadow of something like a tree, but you can still see things around you. Why is it the photons are reaching his eyes, even if the sun is obstructed? Number two, he was wondering about what are shadows like on the moon. Are they sharper or darker than on Earth? And then finally, of course, can shadows move faster than light? Oh, that sounds like it could be a trick question.

I think we should pass that on to our listeners. That's a great idea. so let's play a trick question on our listeners, and so I went out there and I asked them if they thought shadows could travel faster than light. Here's what our listeners had to say on this brilliant question. The obligatory answer is nothing can move faster than the speed of light, but I sense that there are multiple levels to this question.

No, however, I would say that they can appear to travel faster than light as they tend to loom larger than the object that's being illuminated, but no, they can't travel faster than light, according to Einstein. No, they can't because they are the absence of light, so they are related to light's speed. If I had a spherical projector screen at the orbit of Pluto and I had a bright light in front of me, then all of a sudden I put my hand in front of the bright light, it would appear that a giant swath of shadow would go across the screen all at once to me. But I think to Pluto, they would see it different, like it would take the speed of light to go for one place to another.

Since you asked, it means that there's probably some exception, so let's find out. I would say no. Shadows are the absence of light, and light can only travel at the speed of light. That's a fascinating one. I'm going to say no. Shadows aren't a thing. They're absence of a thing. But the answer, my answer would be no. They can't. Yes, but it cannot be used for communication. Yes, shadows can move faster than light, with caveat that only their appearance can move faster than light. no actual photon is moving faster than light. I think so, because nothing's actually moving.

It's just a change in the pattern of light, but you're really breaking my brain here. I think shadows are dependent upon light. It's kind of like the absence of light, and so I think no. I think there's something like this about the way the point where two blades of a scissors cross, if the scissors are closed extremely quickly.

I don't see how shadows could travel faster than the speed of light. So I'm going to say, they travel at the same speed. So I think our listeners know us pretty well. A couple of them are like, oh, this feels like a trick question. I love hearing them use their physics knowledge and try to work it out. Yes. Some people got halfway there. You know, nothing is actually moving.

Other people are like, no, this is an absolute principle. in physics, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. But as usual, language is the culprit here because the principles of physics are very clear mathematically, but things get fuzzy when you express them in language. And so we're going to end up splitting the hairs between nothing and no thing. So thanks for playing along, even though we set you up for failure over and over and over again. We appreciate you. We really do. We really do. And thanks to listeners like Eric, who write in with their questions and inspire these episodes. We really want to hear what you are curious about because we want to scratch your itch about physics, not just ours.

Yes, we want to shine light on the darkness in your lives. And if you want to contact us, you can write us at questions at danielankelly.org. And that's both to send us questions and to get on the list of people that we send these trick questions to. Or just to tell us about your day and send us cute pictures of your cat. Yeah, that'd be great. It works for everything. Yep, I would love that. All right, Daniel.

Let's start with the basic. Shadows sound like something where you're like, oh, yeah, I know what a shadow is. But physics always makes simple concepts much more complicated. So, Daniel, how would you define a shadow? A shadow is just the absence of light. And in the simplest sense, this is fairly straightforward. If you have a single source of light and you have things with very crisp edges, then you can use the concepts of geometric optics where light travels in straight lines. and some regions of your experiment will be illuminated and some regions will not and those are

the shadows. And so places that are obstructed from direct line with the light source will be in shadow and places that are not will not be in shadow. So that's sort of the simplest, clearest setup where the shadows are very straightforward. Okay, now give us some more complicated information because I know that's where you're going. Yeah, because we don't live in that kind of situation. We never have a single source of light. Like number one, our light sources are not They're extended, right? They're a little bit wide. And in physics, we treat a wide light source, you know, like a filament that's a centimeter across, as a bunch of different sources of light. You can treat it as like a set of pinpoint sources, right? So what happens if you have multiple

sources of light? Well, imagine two sources of light. You're in a room and there's two light bulbs. Well, you can be in total shadow if you are blocked from both sources of light, right? And you can be in total illumination. If you can see both sources of light, But there's also a middle ground. What if you're blocked from one source of light and not the other? Then you're in like half shadow, right? And so now this is the fuzzy region. This is actually called the penumbra, places where you are blocked partially from the full

illumination, but not completely. And so any room that you're in, your shadows are going to have these fuzzy edges because of their penumbra's. Like I'm in a room right now and I have like four banks of fluorescent lights, each of which is like a meter across. is if I hold up my hand above my desk, my shadows are very fuzzy. In fact, there's like four of them and they partially overlap. And so I don't have crisp shadows anywhere in my office.

Oh, how sad. No, no, no, it's good. It's good. Because otherwise the shadows would be very, very stark, right? But this causes really interesting effects that are sometimes hard to understand. So could you still, like, if you had one light in a room and it was like a broad light, like a foot wide or something, could you still have like a shadowy shadow, a fuzzy shadow is what I meant, if the light is like reflecting off of the walls a lot and coming back underneath your hand?

Absolutely, yes. And so that's another contribution is that the things in your room do not perfectly absorb light. If everything in your room was a black body object where it just absorbed light and didn't reflect any, then you would have crisper shadows. But if you have a white wall, it's white because it's reflective. light. And so even in the scenario where you have one source of light, where you expect crisp shadows, if your walls are white, they're reflecting light. And so some of that light is going to reduce the shadow. So, yeah, there's lots of ways that shadows get fuzzier because things

are reflective and because there are multiple sources of light. Can I tell you the story about the one time I came across the word panumbra while doing research? Is it going to make me spit up my coffee or throw up? No, it's not gross. It's a little silly. but it's not gross. Ooh, let's do it. We were reading about space settlement proposals, and there was someone who was proposing that Mercury would be a great place to set up a space settlement.

Really? Really, yes. Because of the wonderful outdoor temperatures. Yes, right. So, Mercury being the closest planet to the sun, and with no atmosphere, it gets very hot on one side and very cold on the other. Because it's tidily locked. Yes, right.

But at the penumbra, the temperature is pretty nice. How wide is that? It's like centimeters or meters? It's wide enough that they thought you could put a moving habitat that would have to constantly move to stay with the penumbra. And if you fall behind or get too far ahead, you die, you know, different ways depending on if you're going too fast or too slow. I like that if my house breaks down, I die very quickly. That's very relaxing. I could definitely take a nap in that type house. I think I'll pass on this plan. The other plan was to bury yourself underground at the poles where the temperature was also not so lethal. But anyway, I'm happy where I am. Daniel, I've heard this phrase shadow blister, and I have no

idea what it means. What is a shadow blister? Shadow blister is a really cool effect where as two shadows get closer together, they seem to kind of merge. And even more than that, it seems like they leap out towards each other. They grow towards each other. So if you like stand next to a telephone pole, you have a shadow. Telephone pole has a shadow. As you inch towards a telephone pole, you'll see your shadows merge, but they don't just like overlap geometrically. When you get close to the telephone pole, the two shadows grow out to meet each other. It looks really weird. You're like, what is going on? Am I shadows like hugging? Do they know about each other? Are they conscious? Am I living in some weird science fiction novel? No, physics can't explain this.

And so is it called a shadow blister because you're not supposed to pop them when they get together because then they might get infected? What is, why are they called shadow blisters? Way to make it gross, Kelly. Way to make it gross. I had to get there. They call shadow blisters because they sort of grow out beyond the edge of the existing shadow so you can like create a blister on the light pole shadow because of your shadow.

Well, what's happening here is that you don't notice that the telephone pole shadow has many layers. There's the sort of major shadow, but then there's sort of minor shadows. There's the penumbras, right? And as your penumbras overlap with the penumbras of the shadow, then you start to notice these things. And minute physics, which is a great channel on YouTube, which is amazing explainers about lots of stuff, has a great video on this. You're really got to see this video to understand it. So check out that video. But the key concept there is the penumbra, the fact that shadows are almost never crisp because you don't have single sources of light. That's awesome. I didn't know

that at all. Yeah, exactly. Daniel, I understand my world better now. And so obviously in our lives, most of the shadows come from the sun, right, or from interior lights. But like Kelly told us, you can also get shadows from any source of light, including the moon, which, of course, originally comes from the sun, but it's still kind of cool to be walking around at night and see your shadow. And if the moon is dark and it's an exceptionally clear night and you're out very, very far from light pollution, you can see something really awesome, which is a star shadow. What?

You can see your shadow from the stars, yeah. How could you be sure that it was from the stars? I get if you can't see the moon, then it's definitely not the moon that's causing it. This is crazy. I can't wrap my head around this. It's hard to identify because the stars come from all directions. But in principle, right, it's there. And it's kind of amazing poetic that those photons have crossed like billions and billions of kilometers of space only to be like blocked from hitting the earth by your hand or whatever.

By your dumb face. Exactly. Exactly. And it just reminds me, though, of how frustrating it is that all these photons come from all over the universe, splash on the earth. And mostly they're just ignored. Like those photons carry so much information about what happened inside that star, what was going on. You know, its future, it's history. It's hopes and dreams. And they just like get absorbed by some plant or whatever. And that's just lost. We are tapping into like the tiniest bit of this huge river of information. that's coming at us from the universe. Anyway, and sometimes it makes cool shadows for you to go, ooh, nice. So Daniel clearly is suffering from a massive case of FOMO, missing out on what those photons could tell us. Let's take a break, and hopefully Daniel doesn't descend into despair.

And when we get back, we'll talk about some more complicated features of shadows. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app Or wherever you get your podcasts What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood

A Cuban musician with a dream And one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time You get Desi Arness A trailblazer, a businessman, a husband And maybe most importantly The first Latino to break primetime wide open I'm Wilmer Volderama And yes, I grew up watching him

Probably just like you and millions of others But for me, I saw myself in his story From plening canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways. On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life. The moments it has overlap with mine, how he redefined American television, and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how one man's spotlight lit the path for so many others and how we carry his legacy today. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama. That's part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey there, Dr. Jesse Mills here. I'm the director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health. And I want to tell you about my new podcast called The Mailroom. And I'm Jordan, the show's producer. And like a lot of guys, I haven't been to the doctor in many years. I'll be asking the questions we probably should be asking, but aren't. Because guys usually don't go to the doctor unless a piece of their doctor. their face is hanging off or they've broken a bone.

Depends which bone. Well, that's true. Every week, we're breaking down the unique world of men's health, from testosterone and fitness to diets and fertility and things that happen in the bedroom. You mean sleep? Yeah, something like that, Jordan. We'll talk science without the jargon and get you real answers to the stuff you actually wonder about.

It's going to be fun, whether you're 27, 97, or somewhere in between. Men's health is about more than six packs and supplements. it's about energy, confidence, and connection. We don't just want you to live longer. We want you to live better. So check out the mailroom on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. What up, y'all?

It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from him? I got judged horribly.

The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head.

We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, And they were kind of like, we got into the small talk. And they were just like, so what do you got?

What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back and we're talking about light and shadows. And Kelly's comment reminds me. I actually have a solution to my existential angst about missing all those photons.

How are you going to collect all the photons, Daniel? Well, look, I figure if Dyson can come up with this concept of Dyson spheres, which are basically just solar panels that surround the sun, I'm just going to make a Whiteson sphere, which is basically space telescopes that surround the Earth. Ah. Like, let's just give up our vision of the night sky and replace it with like a solid bank of telescopes that gobble all that information.

Imagine what we could learn. I mean, every time we develop a space telescope that peers at one little corner of the sky, we have our minds blown by what we see out there. And so think about what we could learn if we had like a thousand, a billion times more capacity. It's never going to happen, but we're also never going to build the Dyson sphere. So I can put the Whiteson sphere into the same category of fantastical concepts. Yeah, if only we could collect all the photons and deprive the plants of them. I'm sure that would be great for all of us.

I don't know who's less realistic, you or Dyson, but it's a fun idea to think about. All right. Maybe just half the Earth then, you know, when the Earth is in shadow. How about that? Which hem-oh, when it's in shadow. Okay, I was going to ask which hemisphere you're going to condemn to death. Let's have a vote. No, obviously at night, yeah. So, yeah, this project gets more complicated and less realistic as we think about it. But it was never going to happen anyway. Okay. I mean, people are upset enough about Starlink satellites going in orbit. I'm not sure. Anyway, let's move on. So, so far we've been talking about shadows from a sort of geometrical optics point of view. Shadows just travel in straight lines and like at the edge of an object, either the light is absorbed or it passes.

But the way light interacts with objects is more complicated than that, and it makes shadows fuzzier and weirdly surprising. So shadows played a really important role in the debate about the nature of light. Is it a particle or is it a wave? Is this the two-slit experiment? Yes, the two-slit experiment was part of it. But that actually didn't settle the question in most people's minds about whether light was a particle or wave until they did this crazy shadow experiment. So what's the connection between shadows and the particle or wave nature of light? Well, if light is a particle, then shadows should be very sharp, right?

Either the particle light passes the edge of the object or it's absorbed. But if light is a wave, then it's more complicated because you get things like diffraction and interference. So in the early 1800s, people had done this experiment like the young double slit experiment. to show that light had this wave-like behavior, that it was interfering with itself. And so light was very likely a wave. And you can see the same thing, not just in interference, but in diffraction.

Defraction is like the big sister of interference. The way it works is imagine you have like a circular object and you shine a light on it and you have a screen behind it. What do you expect? Well, you expect a circular shadow, right? If light is a particle, that shadow should be perfect and crisp if you have a single light source.

because there's like an edge where the particles just barely make it around the object and a tiny bit further in, for example, they don't. So you get a very crisp shadow. Are you with me still? Yep, I'm with you. All right, but if light is a wave, that's not how light interacts with matter. What you need to do instead is imagine a bunch of sources of light all around the object. The same way as in the interference experiment where you have two slits. The way you think about that mathematically is each slit is now a source of light. The light makes it through the slit. You imagine that as a point source, and then those two point sources interfere. Diffraction is like that, but now you have lots and lots and lots of sources of light

all around the edge of this object. Everywhere the light is making it around is a point source of light, and those are all going to interfere. And so if you look very carefully at the edge of shadows, you can see this diffraction effect. There is no perfectly crisp shadow. Even in a room filled with black bodies and a single source of pinpoint light, you will still get these fringes at the edge of shadows. You'll have like a dark black center and then you'll

have a white band and then a black ring and then a white band. You get the zebra shadow effect from the diffraction edges. So I've got a bright light and I'm putting my hand under it and I'm not seeing the like so in our outline you have this great picture with ripples that of course our audience can't see. But imagine like you drop a rock in a lake and there's ripples. There's a black spot where the rock got dropped and then there's ripples coming out from there. But that's not what I feel like I'm seeing when I put my hand under the light. And so what was different about the lab conditions that find these ripples, obviously, relative to my office? Yeah.

Well, you have to have a single source of light because otherwise you have all these penumbras which are overlapping and it's hard to isolate this effect. And you have to have a room with no other reflections because this is a subtle effect. It's not easy to see. But it was not so subtle that 200 years ago they couldn't do it. And so the interference experiment and this shadow diffraction experiment were very strong indicators that light was a wave, not a particle. And at the time, people really believed, like, Newton's idea that light was little corpuscules, right? It was this little bits of stuff.

So these were hard to absorb. And there were lots of people who, like, really dug in and they were like, this is absurd. Light cannot be a wave. And one famous physicist Poisson of Poisson statistics and all sorts of stuff, he studied this theory in detail, and he was trying to prove it wrong. I have a feeling I would have been on team Poisson. Light cannot be a wave. It doesn't make sense.

That's just because Poisson means fish, and you're always on team fish, Kelly. I am always on team fish. It's true. The number of jokes that fish people make about Poisson's statistics is maybe nauseating. Off the hook. Off the hook! Oh, thank you, Daniel. Okay, moving on.

I had to dive into that one. Anyway, this is a great example of something that happens in physics all the time that people look for a ridiculous prediction from a theory as a way to prove it wrong, but then it turns out to actually prove it right. So Poisson did the calculations, and he discovered a weird prediction from the wave theory. He discovered that at the center of that shadow, the wave theory predicted a bright spot. Oh. So, you know, the particle theory was the shadow should be perfectly circular. And the wave theory predicted all these fringes, these zebra lines at the edge. But also at the very center, all of the waves add up and constructively interfere because

they're all equidistant from the edge. And so all those photons should be in phase. And so Poisson was like, aha, this is a ridiculous prediction. You're telling me there should be a bright spot at the center of the shadow? Absurd. And so this obviously disproves the wave nature of light, right? That would be fishy. You were just waiting with that joke.

I was. You could see it in my face. And so this was a very strong argument to reject the wave theory. But then a guy went out and actually did it. A guy called Arago. He went out and did this experiment. And there is a bright spot at the center of the shadow. What?

You Google this image you can see. There is a tiny white dot. This is now called the Araggo dot. And it was very conclusive. And people were like, okay. Well, you know, We said that wave theory makes this absurd, nonsensical prediction, so therefore it can't be true. But then if the universe actually does it that way, that's a pretty clear indicator that the wave theory is correct.

So while the Young's double slit experiment and these diffraction experiments were very strong evidence already of the wave nature of light, it wasn't until this shadow experience, seeing a light at the center of the shadow that people were like, okay, fine, light is a wave. Was Pusson a good sport? And was he like, oh, you got me? Now I'm hooked on the wave theory. I know I took your joke. But was Pusson convinced after this, or was he long gone by then? Well, the historical summary I read suggests that he wasn't especially gracious about it. You know, he didn't like on the spot admit the wave theory.

He was skeptical for a while. But, you know, he went on to have a perfectly fine reputation. So he definitely survived scientifically. Yeah, but, you know, I still, I like my scientists to be gracious when they're wrong. But anyway, what are you going to do? So first of all, you have blown my mind because when I first looked at this picture, I didn't see the little white dot in the center. I thought that it was a speck on my screen. And so while you were explaining it, I was moving the outline up and down and I was like, that dot is actually on the image.

Yeah. That's awesome. So shadows taught us something about the nature of light, right? The patterns of shadows are much more complex than you might imagine, and the wave nature of light really is revealed by the patterns of the shadows. Yeah. So this is all a little hard to believe, but I'm with you, but like what? Next are you going to tell me that shadows have colors? shadows do have colors yes absolutely yes so far we've only been thinking about single sources of white light

and complete shadows right but remember we talked about penumbras right you can have multiple sources of light and so you can have intermediate shadows well now take those multiple sources of light so you have three of them and you make those colors you have a filter for each one so you have like a red source a green source and a blue source anywhere where you can see all three sources, you'll be seeing white light. And anywhere all three sources are blocked, you'll be in shadow. But what happens if you're in a place where you're only blocking the red light? Then you have green and blue light, which make a cyan shadow. Or if you block the blue light, the red and green merge making a yellow shadow. Or if you block the green, the red and blue combined to form a magenta

shadow. Daniel, right? So I don't feel like I've ever seen. Yes, but this is totally going against my intuition. Shadows are black, Daniel. Is there a good video online? Yeah, I'm sure you can find a good video. But this sort of bends the definition of shadow, I think, is the issue because in these regions, is it really a magenta shadow? Well, you're shining a red and blue light on it. So people would say it's magenta because you're shining magenta light on it, not because you've blocked the green light, right? And so it really depends on how you define the things that are not fully illuminated or the things that are not fully blocked. Are they parts of the shadow? Are they the colored panumbras or are they partially illuminated?

This is a physicist trick. I'm retreating into philosophy to avoid being proven wrong. All right, well, maybe I'll try this with my kids one day. Okay, so I have a son who loves swimming, constantly he's swimming. Is there anything interesting or different about how shadows are cast underwater or are there panumbra's bigger or something because of how water defrax? Deflex. Oh, what is the word?

Diffrax? Benz. Refrax. Refrax. Thank you. Shadows and water are fascinating because it's a little bit counterintuitive, but water casts a shadow. Like, if you pour water into a glass and you shine a light on it and then have a screen on the other side, you will see the shadow of the water. And at first, you're like, wait a second, why would water have a shadow?

The water is transparent, right? It's like glass. Light passes through it. Why is it making a shadow? What's going on? Did I find a glitch in the matrix? You have not found a glitch in the matrix. Water is transparent, but light does not pass through it without bending.

And so what's happening here is that the light is acting like a lens, and it's refracting a lot of that light away. And so the shadow there doesn't come from the object being completely opaque, but from it being darker behind the column of water because some of that light has been refracted away. Ah, so if you were to measure the light on the sides of the water, it would be brighter after you put the cup there? It might be a tiny bit, but it gets refracted in many, many directions. So most of it won't even hit the screen, yeah. So when you are standing in the ocean, which I guess you get to do as a California and probably pretty often.

Whenever I want. All right, that is pretty solid. So you're standing in the ocean, and it's a bright, sunny day. And you can see shadows cast on the sand by the water. Yes. Is that just because, like, the way the waves build up, it's changing the patterns of how the light is bent? Yeah, exactly, because the surface is not flat.

If you stood in a perfectly still body of water, you would see no shadows from the water on the bottom of the pool, for example. But as soon as you make a ripple on the surface, then you're going to see shadows of those ripples for the same reason that now when the light is hitting the surface of the water, it's not going straight down to the bottom anymore, it's getting bent away. And so when you have a pool that's just like sitting there and it's like gently fluctuating, you get these amazing patterns on the bottom of the pool, right? Brighter spots where the light is being concentrated and darker spots, shadows essentially, where the light is being bent away. And so again, this is a case, not a full obstruction, but of like a rearrangement of where the light is going, creating these patterns of light and shadow. It's really beautiful. One of my favorite things about water. is that you're essentially seeing the surface, right? You're seeing the shadows of the surface.

I like that it keeps me from dying. Water is good. Yes, we are definitely pro-water on this podcast. Another place where I like looking at shadows is on a foggy day. So, like, we on our farm every once in a while, the fog will, like, come up from the bottom fields. And one, I like looking at my shadow in it. But two, I like imagining that a zombie movie is going to be filmed in my fields. because it's kind of creepy.

So is there anything interesting about shadows in fog? Yeah, fog is wonderful for studying shadows because it shows you where the light is, right? It's like having a bunch of lasers and throwing up dust particles in front of them. You can see where the lasers are. And so fog is just like a bunch of particles

of water suspended in the air and they tell you where the light is and you can have a shadow on the fog. And so there's a well-known effect called the Brockton Specter effect where you can have a shadow on a cloud. right and so for example if you stand in front of a car with bright headlights in the fog you'll see your shadow on the fog and it can be this like huge looming shape right but also if you stand in front of your headlights you could see your shadow on a cloud in the sky if you do it right yeah cool and that's the incredible thing about shadows is that you know there's this projection effect where your shadow can be so much bigger than you are right so you can like wave your arms and then like the huge sky version of abuse also waving into arms.

So I want to imagine that the Brockin Spector effect is an effect from, you know, somebody who was like studying ghosts and got confused about what was happening with the fog. But how did this actually get its name? Because Spector always sounds sort of ghostbustery to me. I don't know the exact history of it, but it shows up in like Lewis Carroll and Samuel Taylor Coleridge poems. So it's definitely a thing that's been around for quite a while. Okay. Awesome.

It's sometimes called the mountain specter or specter of the brockin. Oh, that sounds even cooler, Specter of the Bracken. That sounds like it should be in like a Viking tale. It comes from this mountain in Germany, the brocken. It was first observed and described by Johann Schilberslog in 1780. We saw his shadow on the brockin. Oh, cool. All right, learn something new every day.

All right, so every once in a while you'll hear about, like, pressure fronts coming through. And is that like air that is more or less dense? And could that change how shadows are made? I guess I'm trying to figure out if you're next going to tell me that air can also impact shadows. Yes, air can have shadows for the same reason that water can, right? Because air is not a fluid of constant density. When it is, light just passes through it. But if some pockets of air have higher density or lower density, then the light bends in exactly the same way as it does when it hits the surface of the water.

And you can already see this effect like when you look at heat rising above the road on a hot day, right? What you're seeing there are pressure waves in the air, and that's changing how light goes through. That's why you're able to see it, right? And the similar consequences for how light moves through the air. This is why, for example, stars twinkle, right? Stars don't twinkle in space. They only twinkle through the atmosphere because their light is getting bent away from you in a sort of a chaotic, turbulent manner. This is why telescopes on the ground can't see as clearly as telescopes in the sky because

light has passed through this complicated atmosphere and they have these amazing adaptive optics to counteract for this to like in real time bend the path of the light back to re-gather all that light into a crisper image. But effectively, it's like a shadow. If you looked at the ground as light passes through it, you would see regions that are darker and regions that are lighter because of these density fluctuations in the air. That's amazing. And, you know, one of my favorite things about this time of year is that, so, like, I don't stay up late because I'm a total wimp. But in the winter and in the fall, you get, when I go out to do the animal chores, it's already dark. And so on clear days, I can see the stars twinkling. And the other day, I was late to wake up my kids because the stars were twinkling. And I was, like, totally enamored of it and forgot about what time it was and fell behind on my schedule. Well, this start twinkling effect is very cool, and it's, you know, the kind of physics you can enjoy any evening, but the same physics gives you a really weird effect during a lunar eclipse. What? I am dying to hear about that, so let's take a break to increase the suspense, and when we get back, you'll tell us all about it.

with the basic business plan, just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been like a Unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream, and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time? You get Desi Arness, a trailblazer, a businessman, a husband, and maybe, most importantly, the first Latino to break primetime wide open. I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and yes, I grew up watching him, probably just like you and millions of others.

But for me, I saw myself in his story. From planning canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways. podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama. I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life. The moments it has overlapped with mine, how he redefined American television, and what that meant for all of us watching from the

sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how one man's spotlight lit the path for so many others and how we carry his legacy today. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama. That's part of the MyCultura podcast network available

on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Hey there, Dr. Jesse Mills here. I'm the director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health. And I want to tell you about my new podcast called The Mailroom. And I'm Jordan, the show's producer. And like a lot of guys, I haven't been to the doctor in many years. I'll be asking the questions we probably should be asking, but aren't.

Because guys usually don't go to the doctor unless a piece of their face is hanging off or they've broken a bone. Depends which bone. Well, that's true. Every week, we're breaking down the unique world of men's health from testosterone. stern and fitness to diets and fertility, and things that happen in the bedroom. You mean sleep? Yeah, something like that, Jordan.

We'll talk science without the jargon and get you real answers to the stuff you actually wonder about. It's going to be fun, whether you're 27, 97, or somewhere in between. Men's health is about more than six packs and supplements. It's about energy, confidence, and connection. We don't just want you to live longer. We want you to live better. So check out the mailroom on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage.

I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're. trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo. Somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk and they were just like, so what do you got?

What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? What? Check out. not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. to be amazed. I was like, I know the physics. Yeah, it's cool. It's going to get darker, whatever, but there was something really moving about being in the totality, having the sun be so completely blocked momentarily. It just, everything felt so odd. And, you know, I'm not a religious person, but I almost felt spiritual at that moment. I tried to imagine what it might be like to not understand the physics at all and go through that experience. Feel like, whoa, something is happening today. Yes, we are all going to die. That's absolutely what I would think.

Have you seen totality? No, in Virginia a year or two ago, we got a partial eclipse, but even that was pretty amazing. But, you know, as a biologist, I was trying to listen to see if the nighttime animals were waking up and being like, oh, what's going on? And I think there was a little bit of that. I bet there was a lot more of that where you were. Actually, this was in Idaho, I believe it was, for the path of totality, for that eclipse.

Really amazing. Totally encourage everyone to see totality if they can. And there's a really cool effect, which I didn't see at the time, didn't even know about until preparing for this episode. But there are these things called shadow bands that happen during a total eclipse for the same reason as star twinkling. What's happening is that you have the sun now narrowed to a very, very, very narrow source of light, right?

Instead of being a huge blob in the sky, you have like a very thin crescent. So now sunlight is very collimated. All the rays are very, very parallel. And what happens is it creates these thin, wavy lines of alternating dark and light that can be seeing moving and undulating in parallel just before and just after the total solar eclipse. So there's these like shadow bands of the eclipse, just the same way that a solid object

will have these diffraction patterns around it, these zebra patterns. The moon has those patterns, a shadow on the earth. But not for diffraction reasons. It's for the same reason as the star twinkling because now you have this column of light, which then gets bent randomly by the varying density of the air.

But it all is moving in a column so you get these bands. Really incredible. I want to see this in person. I want to see that also. And I also, for the first time, want to see our podcast as a video episode because the extent to which your arms were moving to try to explain that was really fantastic. That's the Italian in me coming out, you know? So the listener asked a question about what shadows would be like on the moon.

And the context for the question was, you know, the moon has a very different. tiny thin atmosphere, an exosphere. How does Earth's atmosphere impact the way shadows are made and would it be different if you were on the moon? So, like, what did the Apollo astronauts see when they looked at their shadows? All right, well, I'm going to give you a pop quiz. I've taught you now enough physics on this episode to answer this question. What do you think, Kelly?

Do you think shadows are crisper on the moon or less crisp? I think that it's probably about the same because you still have light reflecting from lots of different surfaces. and I bet the surface of the moon in particular is pretty reflective. I guess here when the atmosphere changes in density that bounces light around and makes it a little bit less crisp, and so maybe with no atmosphere, I'm going to guess crisper. Crisper, yes, exactly. It's crisper.

And the issue is the atmosphere. I mean, think about how if you're standing on the earth, you look up the sky is blue, right? What's the color of the sky and the moon? Black? It's black, right? because there's no atmosphere there to reflect light. And so the atmosphere here is blue. That means that you're getting light from all directions, right? Yes, it's mostly from the sun and you can see shadows. But the answer to Eric's other question is the reason you can see still light when you're

standing behind a tree and the sun is blocked is because it's light reflecting everywhere on the earth from all over the sky. And yes, and all the buildings and whatever. But the atmosphere itself is like bouncing light everywhere. And on the moon, you have no atmosphere. And so It's much more geometric. Yes, you do have rocks that are reflecting light. And, of course, during the nighttime, we see the reflection of the moon. But the atmosphere is a big contributor to making shadows fuzzy. And, of course, fluctuations in the atmosphere make that fuzzy.

So, yes, the reason you still see stuff when you're standing in shadow is because it's light coming from many sources, not just one. And on the moon, shadows are crisper. But shadows are also important on the moon for another reason that you might find interesting, which is they provide place for water ice to accumulate, right? because shadows on the moon are very, very cold, right? The moon surface is crazy. It's super hot.

It's super cold. It depends on are you in the blinding path of the sunlight? And if you're not, then water ice can survive. And isn't there a place like on the lunar pole where light never reaches? Yes, that's right. On both poles and places like Shackleton Crater. It's like eternal shadow or something really dark. Oh, craters of eternal darkness.

There you go, exactly. And shadows there are really important because they, preserve water ice. And if we ever do live on the moon, that would be really valuable, right? So shadows could save our lives on the moon. Yeah, although I'll note that there's not a lot of water in those shadows. But there is some. It could get us started. We'd have to be real careful about recycling it. And shadows have also really helped us understand the nature of our place in the cosmos. Famously, more than 2,000 years ago, the Greeks used shadows to measure the radius of the earth, right? Greeks so clever, so geometrical, they realize that the Earth is probably a

sphere because as you move around it, you can see different kinds of stars, right? Different constellations emerge as you move around the Earth. So the Greeks much smarter than like, you know, certain rappers and YouTube influencers who still deny that the Earth is a sphere. But they went beyond just saying, oh, the Earth is likely a sphere. They use the behavior of shadows and a little bit of geometry to measure the radius of the earth and got it pretty accurate, like more than 2,000 years ago. Well, okay, so can you give us more details about how they did that? Yeah, so imagine you're in a city where the sun is directly overhead. It's like high noon.

And so all the shadows point straight down, right? There's basically no shadows. Then you have another city that's like 100 kilometers away. And that city's not going to be at high noon. It's going to have some shadows, right? And you can measure the length of those shadows. And now make a triangle where you know the distance between the two cities and you can measure the length of the shadow. The length of that shadow depends on the curvature of the earth because if the earth was very, very flat, that shadow would be small.

And as the earth gets more and more curvature, that shadow would grow longer and longer. So by measuring the length of the shadow in Alexandria, at the time that the sun was directly overhead in another city, which I can't pronounce, a Greek dude named Erastonis. was able to measure the circumference of the Earth just using like a stick and some geometry and measuring a shadow. So like eratosthenes, I'm not going to say it right, called his friend down in Sain and was like, we're both taking the measurements right now, go!

I guess did they also have really good clocks? Or they just were like, that is, okay. Yeah, exactly. That's amazing. So this is really cool, but the fascinating thing is that flat earthers have not let this point go, and they argue that this experiment doesn't actually prove

that the earth is round, and they're kind of right. Oh, no. Because even if the earth was flat, you would still have a shadow in one place when the sun is directly overhead in the other city. That's true. Essentially, it's like measuring the earth to have an infinite radius. But you would definitely get a shadow, because this whole method assumes that the sun is really, really far away

and that the light is parallel, essentially. But in the flat earth model, the sun is very, very close, and so you would still get a shadow in one place and not a shadow in the other. But there's a way around it. All you need to do is add a couple more sticks. So instead of just having two points, you have like three or four. And the two models give different patterns of shadows. In the flat earth model, you get a linear relationship between the length of the shadows.

And in the spherical Earth, you get a nonlinear relationship as things move around the curve of the Earth. So anyway, we're pretty sure that the Earth is not flat. And you can actually prove it using shadow and rod experiments. It's true the two-point experiment doesn't refute the flat earth. But anyway, shadows do show us that the earth is round and allow us to measure the roundness of the earth, which is kind of amazing. That is amazing.

Way to go, shadows. So the last question the listener had was the trick question that we shared with our extraordinaire, which is, do shadows move faster than light? So, all right, now we have all of the background we need to understand the nuance to this question. Yeah. So take it home, Daniel. The answer is, yes, shadows do move faster than light. What?

But the problem is that the rule says no thing can move faster than the speed of light relative to anything else. But shadows are not a thing. That's the problem. They're the absence of a thing. and as a shadow moves, it's not really the same object. So let's imagine a concrete scenario, right? Let's say you have a screen in the sky instead of the sky. You're like, you know, Daniel has built his telescopes that block the view of the world.

And so you have... Death is impending. Exactly. Right. And you can imagine a scenario we have a bright source of light, and you can do like shadow puppets on the sky, right? Or imagine clouds or whatever. And you can move your hand a small amount. the shadow will move a very large amount, right? Because the screen is very, very far away.

And so this projection is far away. And you get this multiplier effect. And then you can ask, well, if I move my hand really fast and the screen is really far away, could those shadows move faster than light? And the answer is yes in the sense that, like, the image of your hand could be in one place. And then faster than light could go from that one image to another image, the image, the shadow could appear somewhere else, right? Does that making sense? Like, imagine somebody in the sky shooting a laser from one shadow to the other, the second shadow would appear before the laser arrived. In that sense, the shadow is moving faster than light.

And you're wondering, like, how does that make sense physically? What's really going on? And the issue is that the second shadow is not the same thing as the first shadow, right? Both of them are being created by the absence of light. Nothing is moving faster than light in this scenario. And there's no way to communicate between shadow one and shadow two. There's no information passing. It's just like if I shone a laser in one direction, and then I turned it off and shown it

in another direction, the laser spot would appear to move faster than light, but it's not the same spot, right? It's like I made a spot, and then later I made another spot. I'm connecting them in my mind because they both came from the same laser, but it's not like anything moved from laser spot one to laser spot two. Okay. So in the same way, nothing went from the shadow's initial location to the shadow's final location. You have a wave of light that's obstructed and not obstructed.

that's creating the shadow, and then a different wave of light that's creating a different shadow somewhere else. And your mind is like, shadows are a thing. And so it was here and it was there. And if I do distance divided by time, I get a number bigger than the speed of light. Yeah, that's true. But shadows aren't a thing. It's like comparing where one thing is and later something else is and calculating the velocity between those two. It doesn't really work. Is that like saying that the information that the photon has been stopped travels faster than a photon would travel. No, the photon, the information that the photon has been stopped isn't traveling from shadow one to shadow two. It's traveling from the source to shadow one and from

the source to shadow two. Like, you could signal somebody up there in the sky using shadows or not shadows, but that information obviously travels at the speed of light because you're either sending photons or you're stopping to send photons, but all that information travels at the speed of light. And you could do the same for person two, but you can't get information from shadow one to shadow two, right? There's no way for you to do that. You're You can send information. All the information is coming from the source of light to the shadows or the non-shadows, not between them.

Got it. So the appearance of shadows can move faster than light, but shadows are not really a thing. They don't carry information. And so in that sense, you know, they're breaking their rules, but they're not really limited by the rules because they're not a thing. They don't have information. Well, thank you, Daniel, for illuminating all of our understanding of this question. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun talking about.

shadows because they're neat. Well, I hope that we can help bring shadows out of the darkness. Shadows are a wonderful way to think about light and to think about physics and just to, like, you know, wonder in an everyday sense how everything works. There are fantastic mysteries of physics all around us. There are. And please send us your questions about the mysteries of, you know, physics, I guess, if that's what keeps you up at night. But definitely the questions that you have about biology, which is a fascinating topic.

And if you're the descendant to the famous physicist Poisson and you want to write in to defend his legacy? Please do. All right, until next time, Extraordinaries. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would.

We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at Questions at Danielandkelly.org.

Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream,

and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time? You get Desi Arness. On the podcast star in Desi Arness, Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life, how he redefined American television and what that man for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What up y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends. people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on?

What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Check out Not My Best Moment with me kept on stage on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. On this week's episode of next chapter,

I, TDJ, sit down with Denzel Washington, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and cultural icon. I don't take any credit for it. I just didn't put me first. I just put God first, and he's carrying me. Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes drop weekly.

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