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 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

Now, help me unpack this, Neil, because I don't have a great answer.

I would like a better answer.

Is that a fair way to think of?

The way the podcast did it, and this was the first time I ever sort of thought, oh, okay, I get this.

We're sort of talking about photons as particles here, like little billiard balls and stuff.

But of course, remember, famously, they're electromagnetic waves, right?

I mean, they're not just little balls.

And so what the podcast did is it showed that there's an electromagnetic wave, there's a photon going in, and there's other atoms around.

And basically the electromagnetic wave starts those other atoms kind of vibrating along with it.

But there's a delay, there's a lag to kind of get those other fields, those other electric fields vibrating as the photon goes by.

And the resulting speed is actually a combination.

It's actually a way of resolving those two different waves

vibrational modes.

Yeah.

The speed of the wave that we measure is a combination of the speed of the photon in a vacuum, but then also the speed of the variations of basically the oscillations of everything around it.

Those two combine into the measured speed of the photon that we see.

That's fascinating.

So the question about, I mean, it's the same thing, Neil.

Absolutely.

When you talk about how a photon changes, even as it goes through a vacuum, it loses energy.

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