What Is The Speed of Dark?

Nyctophobia is the fear of the dark.


However, there’s another more chilling fear.
It’s the worry that darkness will disappear.


Optophobia, the fear of opening your eyes.


Light journeys at the fastest speed possible for a physical item.
Darkness is eliminated when the light appears and returns
when light leaves.

The speed of dark
is the speed of light but there are other kinds of darkness
that can move quicker than light speed. For example,
a shadow.


Throughout a range, a shadow can end up being much larger than the object creating it,
but still imitate its source, relocating the same way for the exact same quantity of time.
So when a shadow is bigger than the things casting it, it moves a greater range
when the item moves but in the very same amount of time. Make a shadow big enough
and it can take a trip across the surface faster than light.


If you, here on Earth, cast a shadow onto the Moon,
not an easy thing to do, that pointed from, state, point A.
on the moon’s surface area, and after that you moved your finger so that the shadow moved.


To point B, your finger would just move a few centimeters.
In a fraction of a second. But the shadow it cast on the Moon.


Would move countless kilometers in the exact same quantity of time.
Do it right and you’re quickly producing a shadow.
That breaks the light barrier.
But absolutely nothing’s incorrect here.
The rule is that info can’t travel faster than light.
You can’t cause something to happen somewhere else.


Faster than light could take a trip from you to that somewhere else.
And our superluminal shadow is transferring.
No details from point A to point B.
Sure, point B is being cast into darkness.


Faster than a light-speed message from A could warn him it’s coming.
However, darkness isn’t taking a trip from point A to point B.
It’s taking a trip from you to point A and point B.
at the speed of light. What we tend to call a shadow.
is truly simply a cross-section of a three-dimensional area.


The darkness you are causing only changes to shape.
When recently unblocked light fills.
The previous gap. That’s all shadow is: .
A space. So, in a way, a shadow doesn’t.
Travel at all. That’s an impression caused by us thinking.
That a shadow is a physical thing, when in reality.
A shadow is just the absence of physical things -.
photons – which down along at the speed limit.
of deep space. However, that does not indicate two shadows.


Can’t kiss. Or, a minimum of, .
appear like they are. View as Man brings two shadows.
Near each other. Right prior to they make contact, .
The shadows appear to magically bulge toward one another, .
In a sort of smooch of darkness. What’s going on is?


Shadow’s blister result and it pertains to the anatomy of a shadow.
The region where an item totally obstructs a source of light is called.
The umbra. It’s the darkest part of the shadow in the most prototypical.
Part of the shadow. Where just a part of the light source is.
Blocked, we find the fainter penumbra. But as two or more penumbras.
Technique and overlap, the combined quantity of light they obstruct can be enough to.
produce a perceivable distinction, .


The shadow blister. The Earth has a huge.
Umbra, it’s 1.4 million kilometers long.
That’s how far away you’d need to be from the Earth for it to no longer have actually a.
big enough evident diameter.
To shut out all of the sun. Here, on the surface of Earth, we are no place near that.
Far away, which is why night is so umbral.
The night is just the Earth’s shadow falling on you.


You eclipse.
Sundowns are cool, they’re stunning to look at, but look the other way.
and you can see the lumbering shadow of our world.
Our atmosphere scatters shorter wavelengths of light.
More than longer wavelengths, that makes the sky.
appear blue.

However, in Earth’s shadow, there’s less light to scatter and the sky.
appears darker. During golden, you can see.
The separation. While driving east from Denver to Kansas City.
I got a particularly great view of it.


This is Earth’s approaching night-making shadow.
The beautiful pink band above it? That’s the belt of Venus.
It’s caused by the sky reflecting the colors.
of the sunset behind us. You’ve most likely seen that.
Right after the sun sets, and vanishes from view, .
There’s still light in the sky, scattered from the.
No longer visible sun. This is what we call twilight.
and there are many different phases of twilight.


If the sun is less than 6 degrees listed below the horizon it’s technically.
Civil twilight. You can still do a lot of stuff outdoors without the need for artificial lights.
Down to 12 degrees listed below the horizon, we have.
Nautical twilight: artificial lights are more or less essential however the sky.
Still scatters adequate light to be brilliant enough for ships at sea.


To navigate by seeing a contrast of the horizon in between dark sea.
and faintly lit sky. Down to 18 degrees.
Astronomical golden is occurring. It appears like.
Night however the sky can still get darker. Till.
Huge golden ends, not all nighttime astronomical observations can be made.
Below 18 degrees is technically, .


Honestly, night. If you live at greater than 48.5 degrees north or south latitude, .
Throughout the summer the sun never goes more than 18 degrees below the horizon.
It’s never technically night. Places like London just reach astronomical golden at the most.
During these months. So, if you live in among these locations, .
and you wish to prevent from doing something throughout the summertime, just tell people.


You’ll do it this evening. You’ll purchase yourself a couple of weeks.
But that’s slow darkness. Let’s.
Cut to the chase since we are looking for fast darkness.


When scissor blades snip, the intersection point in between both blades moves quicker.
than the blades themselves. Think about it in this manner: .
If you had a pair of scissors with blades that were a light-year long.
and it took one second to close them, the intersection point would’ve took a trip an entire.
Light year, in not a year, however …
a second. No laws are being broken here since such a snip.
Would be physically impossible. As I have actually pointed out in the past, .
Stiff items don’t move instantaneously all over.


When a push force is applied to them.
Rather, that force moves through electro-magnetic forces, from one atom.
To the next, and so on down the line. A compression wave.
That travels at the speed of noise through the material.
But what if we overlooked that issue by enabling the blades to merely be individually.
Already in motion? Well, their point at the crossway.


Can still take a trip faster than light, due to the fact that it’s not a physical thing.
It’s just a geometric point and it carries.
No more info than you might already gather.
By witnessing the approaching blades.


However do not suspend that geometric point of intersection just yet. It’s the crucial too.
Another type of darkness that can move much faster than light.
When waves collide their crests can fuse into larger crests, .
Their troughs into bigger troughs. This is positive disturbance.
But crests hitting troughs counteract.
Damaging disturbance if these waves are light, .
The result is darkness. And, in specific scenarios, .
Darkness created by doing this can travel like the crossway between 2 lines -.
Faster than light. Imagine these concentric circles as waves of light.
The lines are wave crests and the spaces in between.
Are troughs. When they meet the points where they converge.
Leave up and down faster than the waves travel, .
Especially in the middle, which, in the case of light waves, makes them.
Faster than light. The superluminal speeds of these dark patches can be seen actually plainly.


If we make the wave crests of one source black.
In addition to the background. Overlapping regions where red.
Glimpses through represent damaging disturbance -.
Darkness. And you can see how, specifically in the middle, .
This darkness races up and down much faster than the waves.
In 1995 a guy named McArthur Wheeler.
Robbed a bank in Pittsburgh. He was caught.
Due to the fact that his only disguise was lemon juice.
He covered his face with it. He understood that lemon juice could be used as an unnoticeable ink.


When writing on paper, revealed by heating, and he understood so little about?
Why that worked, and he understood so little about how cams worked.
That he assumed, with extreme confidence, that lemon juice.
Could make him unnoticeable too.


Seriously. Wheeler is an extreme example.
and was the motivation for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Beginners, individuals inexperienced in particular disciplines.
Will typically overestimate their understanding and abilities.
In stated disciplines due to the fact that they do not even understand.


How little they know, just how much more there is to learn.
On the other side, experts in a particular field will often.
Ignore their understanding, have less confidence in their capabilities, .
or think that everybody else has the same level of knowledge that they do.
What drives the Dunning-Kruger effect.
is the reality that often the more you discover something the more you understand.
Just how abundant and intricate and frustrating and full of as of yet unanswered questions it truly is.


George Bernard Shaw once famously toasted Albert Einstein by saying.
” Science is always wrong.
It never ever resolves an issue without developing 10 more.”.
Einstein didn’t precisely disagree. He used.
Geometry to highlight how ignorance grows faster than knowledge, saying.
” As our circle of knowledge broadens so does the circumference.
of darkness surrounding it. Learning.


Studying, shedding light on a field of questions likewise exposes just how.
In the dark we continue to be. The number of shadowy things there are left.
For us to light up. The size of the light.
Never surpasses the shadowy circumference.”.
However what’s the speed of that kind dark? The speed of the development.
of the variety of things we know we are in the dark about.
What’s the speed of lack of knowledge?
If we define a lack of knowledge as the distinction in between concerns we understand to ask, .
and answers we have, the field of agnotology, .


The study of ignorance, suggests that the quantity of.
Things we understand we remain in the dark about is growing quicker.
than the quantity of the things we have clarified.
Is it a coincidence that the phrase “in the dark” stemmed throughout of any ages.
The age of enlightenment? When Leeuwenhoek put a scraping.
From his tooth under a collection of magnifying lenses he constructed, .
He saw, for the very first time in human history, .
Little moving animals … microorganisms.
He called them ‘Animalcules’. The discovery shed light on why.
Food spoiled life didn’t spontaneously originated from old meat, .
It was already there, we just could not see it.


However, the discovery also showed us that we were in the dark.
About a completely brand-new realm of biology.
As Philippe Bourdeau has poetically put it, “knowledge results in benightedness.
Science entails science”.
What’s really cool about the expanding size of our science circumference?
is what Stuart Firestein, the Chair of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, has said about it, .
” It exists that science starts, .


Where the realities go out, just beyond them.”.
He states, “it is an error to bob around in the circle of facts, .
Instead of riding the wave to the excellent stretch.
Lying outside the circle.”.


If science is a road trip, realities are the pictures.
We bring the method, the fuel that drives it forward.
is ignorance. Realities … more like.
Fax. Part of the past, not the method forward.
When it pertains to understanding our world, .
Understanding why is obsolesce by asking why.
Knowing truths makes you brilliant, however the.
Similarly fast, sometimes quicker, and a lot of gratifying prize.
is the dark.
And admitting that you do not know everything but that you would like to know some of it.

Your Mass is NOT From the Higgs Boson

The Higgs Boson is awesome but it’s NOT responsible for most of your mass! Thanks to audible.com for supporting this episode.

The Higgs mechanism is meant to account for the mass of everything, right?

Well no, only the fundamental particles, which means that electrons derive their mass entirely from the Higgs interaction but protons and neutrons, made of quarks, do not.

In fact, the quark masses are so small that they only make up about 1% of the mass of the proton (and a similar fraction of the neutron).

The rest of the mass comes from the energy in the gluon field. Gluons are massless, but there is so much energy in the field that by E=mc^2 there is a significant amount of mass there.

This is where most of your mass comes from and the mass of virtually everything around you.