Michelle Thaller

speaker

577 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson · Running Out of Matter with Michelle Thaller · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

When you look through water, you see light bend, and that's because the speed changes.

And it was only his podcast that finally got me to understand light is an electromagnetic field.

And when it's in the presence of other electromagnetic fields, when you're not in a vacuum, there's other atoms and molecules around, the electromagnetic field basically becomes a combination of those two fields.

And he did this great podcast about that.

The question about whether a photon is reflected becomes a different photon is fascinating.

So let's break it up.

Let's go back to the beginning.

I mean, this is one of the craziest, and it's true,

The idea that when you're traveling at the speed of light, I mean, photons obviously don't have any consciousness.

They're not able to observe this.

But a photon has no idea that space and time exist.

When you're traveling at the speed of light, time goes to a zero.

You don't experience the passage of time.

And when you think about you're frozen in a moment of time, you can go any distance in the universe instantaneously to your perspective.

So a photon doesn't really experience the universe as ever having expanded.

You know, we're still a point, a thing, you know, almost a singularity to a photon.

It does not experience space and time.

What the hell does that mean?

I mean, how do you wrap your head around that?

I mean, the light that's bouncing off my lamp from my face right now doesn't agree with me that space and time exist.

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