Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
And yet, for a source of energy that has become synonymous with greater understanding, light is surprisingly difficult to understand.
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Light helps us see other things better, sure, but when scientists tried to look at light itself, it was surprisingly difficult.
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No, I don't mean that they started staring into any lamps, please don't do that at home, but experiments in the last 200 years or so have proven that what light appears to be and what light is are actually two different things, for one simple reason.
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Annoyingly enough,
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Light behaves differently when you're not looking at it, compared to when you are.
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What is the true nature of light?
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Why is it behaving strangely when we're not looking?
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And what does it say about how the universe really works?
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I'm Alex McColgan, and you're watching Astrum, and in today's video, it's time we try and find out.
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Let's shed some light on light.
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Let's begin with the basics.
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What is light?
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In the early 1700s, Isaac Newton theorized that light was made up of tiny little particles that he called corpuscles.
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But in 1801, nearly 100 years later, a man named Thomas Young discovered that light must actually be more wave-like than particle-like.
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He proved this using an important method known as the double slit experiment.
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He set up a source of light and shone it through two narrow slits onto a board.
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Young noticed that rather than getting two bands of light on the other side of the slits, a strange striped pattern was forming.
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This was known as an interference pattern, and was incontrovertible proof that light had been travelling as a wave.
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Why?
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Let's talk about waves for a moment.
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Showing 2021–2040 of 29,301 · page 102 of 1466
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