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"Blood is actually blue!" (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 7 points 4 months ago (9 children)

Gamma rays are photons like light no? Is the speed in a medium related to its energy/frequency? Or am I misunderstanding something

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    That's correct, sort of. Individual photons travel always at c (they don't have mass, so they literally can't go slower), but when traveling through a transparent (for their frequency) medium they don't go through the atoms or around them—they would hit an atom (its electrons, really), get absorbed, and then re-emitted. The average speed of all the photons will be lower than c, and depends on the frequency, that's how we got rainbows. For most frequencies, including visible light, it goes slower the higher the frequency is, but gamma rays/x rays photons are so high energy that they don't interact with the electrons, but with the nuclei—that's why you want materials like lead or tungsten to block them—which are much smaller, resulting in fewer absorbing-emitting interactions and a higher average speed.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Its because "speed" can refer to two different things in this context. Group velocity is the speed that your light waves can send a message it. This cannot move faster than light. Phase velocity on the other hand is the speed of the peaks of the wave. This can move faster but its not possible to send a signal through this.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    True, but this doesn't explain if gamma rays move faster than light in certain materials, right?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (5 children)

    If you had a material with no light passing through it, then you shined a light through it, it would only move at the group velocity. The whole "faster than light" thing refers to the phase velocity, but you can't have a phase velocity if the light hasn't gotten there yet.

    Saying that gamma rays (or any light in general) moves faster than light is technically true but very misleading and relies heavily on when you define "speed" as.

    3Blue1Brown has a good video on why the phase velocity is different from the group velocity if you're interested in why. The faster than light phase velocity happens when the "phase kicks" are so delayed that the phase appears to move forward.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (4 children)

    I must misunderstand, I wasn't thinking of the "group velocity" (or that "frequency" making light "faster than light"), but plain old slow speed of light!

    Like in water, light moves (as for data transfer) slower than in vacuum, right? There are materials that slow down light to a crawl (I read some theory some time ago about slowing down light to almost zero).

    So I thought that in some material, x-rays were faster than light, both being slower than c of course.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    c is the speed of light in a vacuum. It is impossible to send information faster than c. x-rays are also just light so everything I said before also applies to x-rays.

    I'm not very familiar with how light interacts with materials since it wasn't covered in the electromagnetism class that I took, so the next part might be wrong. The speed of light is calculated by looking at Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism and recognizing that it is the equation for a wave. The speed is then calculated as c = 1/sqrt(epsilon_0 * mu_0) where epsilon_0 and mu_0 are the vacuum permittivity and the vacuum permeability. Inside a material, I think the permittivity and permeability are different and thus the speed of light as determined by Maxwell's equations would be different. I know its not possible for the speed (group velocity) of light in a material to be faster than the speed of light in a vacuum because otherwise, you could send information faster than c, which is impossible.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Yeah we all know that (don't remember that function but if you say so, tje one I was taught was for sure simpler), but the question is not if light can be made to move slower (or over c) but if it moves slower than another electromagnetic radiation like x-rays in some specific material.

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