Cosmic Queries – Your God Is Too Small
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What are the implications of finding alien life versus being alone in the universe?
Chuck, that might have been the best Cosmic Queries ever.
Yep. Grab bag. It was certainly entertaining. And if you want to know what happened, well, you're going to have to listen. That's all there is to it. Not giving anything away. That's cold.
No, that's how good it was.
It's worth the listen. All right, coming right up.
Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, you're the grab bag man. I'm the man with the bag.
This is Yousef Kazwini, who says, Greetings, StarTalkers. Yousef from Damascus, Syria. Here. Damascus? That's right. Whoa. That's right. Ancient, ancient city Damascus. I found your podcast recently and I joined the club. Welcome aboard, my friend. Here's my question. You often mention pro-photons travel at the speed of light at all times. Working as an optics engineer and dealing with TIRF microscopes, I wonder how evanescent waves during total eclipse Internal reflection, TIR, is thought of from a particle physics perspective. Are the photons moving at the speed of light, but somehow without propagating? Or the photons don't exist at all. But then what is interacting with the sample on my microscope? Thank you.
I love your work. P.S. Chuck, you surely deserve an honorary PhD by now, my brother. Oh, look at that.
My brother.
My brother.
Optics is a huge field that does very important work on a lot of frontiers. Optics is what do you do with electromagnetic waves? Do you bend them? Do you reflect them? Do you trap them? Do you heat? What do you do with them? An entire branch of physics And engineering addresses those questions. So I don't know how specific the example is that he's giving and how that would lend itself to my explanation. Okay. Okay? So what I will otherwise say is the speed of light is not just a good idea. It's not just a good idea. It's the law. It's the law. Thank you. Okay.
How do photons behave in different mediums?
That's a dated reference to 55 miles an hour speed limit when we went out and said we're not going to go fast anymore. So that doesn't mean light always travels at that speed. Exactly. It means it will never travel faster than that speed. Right, because you can slow it down. So let's tell you do that. Okay, it turns out you sort of can slow it down. Right. I got you.
So the medium itself... can slow the travel.
Yes. The medium. Okay, but the way it slows it down is fascinating. Interesting. Okay? Okay. Okay, so I'm going to beam a light. Just going on about my business. Going about my business.
Look at me traveling at the speed of light.
Nothing can be faster. Nothing can be faster. Then you hit... the air, or you hit a piece of glass or a piece of water. This is for visible light going through what we would say are transparent objects. If you're transparent, it means the light stays coherent as it goes through. So that the waveform maintains its structure. If it does not maintain its structure, light can still get through, but we would not call it transparent. Yes. You know the word we have for that? Translucent. Translucent. Yes. And lucent means light in Latin. Latin, yeah. Luce is light. Luce. So the light comes up to the boundary. Some light will get reflected. And optics people know and understand that, okay? That happened, you can't do anything about that.
You can try to minimize it by having what are called these coatings that will delete any attempt for the light to reflect back, right? And it's fun the way they do that. So you have a coating that's half the wavelength of the light that you're using. Interesting. Okay? So then the light goes through, and by the time it wants to reflect back, the light that's coming in is out of phase with it.
oh so it creates a disruption and it flattens out it flattens the light look at that I never knew that isn't that brilliant that's god people are smart that
Yeah, so a coated lens prevents the reflections off of surfaces. Interesting. Okay? And cameras, especially zoom lenses and other big industrial cameras, they have many, many lenses in them.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the implications of finding alien life versus being alone in the universe?
0:00–2:42
2
How do photons behave in different mediums?
2:42–5:22
3
What is the significance of the speed of light in optics?
5:22–6:52
4
How does total internal reflection work in optical systems?
6:52–8:45
5
What are the cosmic mysteries we may never resolve?
8:45–10:32
6
How do gravitational waves affect our understanding of the universe?
10:32–12:22
7
What will Earth's future look like without humans?
12:22–15:49
8
Which species might dominate Earth after humans?
15:49–49:26