Physicists create compressible “gas of light”
uni-bonn.de
uni-bonn.de
This seems like the kind of clever but also crazy thing a kid would come up with based on limited information about the world, but that definitely doesn't work.
There's got to be more to it than this description... right? Or this is one of those things where a physicist said "mirror" but actually means something totally different that no normal person would call a mirror, as physicists seem to do often and which causes so very much misunderstanding of physics?
There’s a lot of them, starting with the fact that gas particles have mass, and photons generally don’t. However, confinement causes mass. The gas particles are in a sense confined even when floating free (by other fields), and photons are only confined when they bounce off the walls, however-
They do that a lot. As you zoom out, the phenomena start to look alike.
I watched the video and nothing they showed looks like a mirrored box.
The box is also not necessarily like your average shoe box, I'd guess it's much smaller (millimeters), show it's not shown on the video directly, up close.
I found the idea of this experiment strangely compelling too.
This stuff is hard to begin to understand for most people I would imagine. That is generally true for me. For me, that all translates into an fun and interesting mode of conceptual thought akin to what happens with good sci-fi.
Mixing the concepts of gasses and light is novel to me as well, and I suppose that is what makes this one compelling.
I wonder whether this idea might be combined with how we have slowed the travel speed of light down many orders? Perhaps the materials forming the mirror box do that?
I am going to read this one again (during more normal waking concentration hours) and follow a few of the science rabbit holes the references will surely contain.
So the Pythagoreans were on the right track!
That's interesting, can you elaborate? Or point to some link that discuss this
> A simple example of an object with moving parts but zero total momentum is a container of gas. In this case, the mass of the container is given by its total energy [...] Similarly, even photons, if trapped in an isolated container, would contribute their energy to the mass of the container. Such extra mass, in theory, could be weighed in the same way as any other type of rest mass, even though individually photons have no rest mass.
i.e., it's a consequence of energy-mass equivalence, which applies equally to isolated systems as it does individual particles.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm2543 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Bragg_reflector
Now I remember this- I wanted to know what the 'true color' (ha) of a mirror would be, and imagined a sphere of mirrors. However I could not wrap my head around how one would keep the light from bouncing off themselves, hiding away the 'true color' again. Haha.
Compressibility and the Equation of State of an Optical Quantum Gas in a Box; Science; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abm2543