Spheres are easy; controlling the exact size might be tricky, but you can just make a lot and then sort them. The lens might be harder, depending on size and shape.
What kinda fascinates me is how simple (on paper) this idea is, despite it's originality. It doesn't require much knowledge on the specifics to understand it, as it's literally just refraction and conservation of momentum and I'm fairly sure even a high schooler could understand the processes involved
the true is , it is difficult once you really understand what did they do. He just put it on lame terms for the average high school student to understand , but this is HARD to do.
I was invited to Gerard Mourou's lab once about 15 years ago. It was quite impressive. I got out of the laser business to do robotics, but it was a lot of fun back then.
After watching this I thought: Wow! Both of these actually Nobel-worthy ideas are so simple, yet so well explained here, that it makes one feel like any old layman could have come up with them and grabbed that prize... But of course "Understood instantly" does not mean "Able to invent". Question: How well does the glass ball suspended in a beam of light handle movement of said beam? Rotation, withdrawal, acceleration, etc. Say; If I point my laser slowly away from it, will the glass ball follow along? And what is the speed limit here? Rate of change; can it be high? As fast as light speed, perhaps? Or a non-epsilon magnitude / medium-sized fraction of it? Example: A sudden 180° will likely drop or launch the ball, losing it; but a subtle focal length adjustment or a nanometer push/pull will not. The subject will be re-centered by the various forces as shown in the animation.
Let's do a ballpark estimate. The limiting factor is how much acceleration can the beam put into the ball. The ball has known mass (m) and the laser has known power (P). Movement perpendicular to the beam is stabilized by the refraction. Let's assume the ball is perfectly transparent and that there is a position where it refracts the full beam perpendicularly. The acceleration of the ball is a=F/m. The force provided by the beam is its power divided by speed of light F=P/c. So the maximum theoretical acceleration of the ball is a ~ P/(c*m). Off course in practice it will be less. We need to take into account absorption, the fact that the refracted beam is divergent, the fact that horizontal refraction may not be possible etc. All of these are some factor ~0.001. We now may substitute some numbers. Wavelength of the laser is l~10^-6m. Volume of the ball is V=l^3=10^-18m^3. Density of glass is ro~1000kg/m^3, so the mass of the ball is m=ro*V~10^-15kg. The power of the laser is P~1W. Speed of light is c~10^8m/s. The acceleration is a~0.001*P/(c*m) ~ 10^4m/s^2 ~ 1000g. I probably underestimated the size of the ball significantly. But nevertheless, the force seems to be strong enough that you can probably walk around with the suspended ball, but probably not enough to shoot it out of a cannon.
I would imagine that it wouldn't have a hard speed limit, but rather a point where it's accelerating so slowly it's basically not accelerating at all anymore (then a practicality limit where the laser will refract over a long enough distance). The closer it gets to the speed of light, the more energy it's going to need to accelerate. At some point this will mean that the tiny force being exerted is still technically speeding it up, but not really in any measurable way. Objects with mass cannot reach the speed of light because the energy requirement to speed it up approaches infinity as you get closer it. Might start out kind of fast though, the fact that they can hover it means it's counteracting it's natural 9.8m/s acceleration towards Earth.
I got some pretty amazing mathy replies. Thanks guys! I really appreciate the free education you've given me this day. + Make sure you click "Show more replies" and "Read more" on each of them, to learn like I did. Especially comments by Victor Titov, KohuGaly, and psmitty840. Huge thumbs up to you all.
@@x3ICEx it should track the beam if done slow enough, but you gotta look at the scale, tiny glass beads might be finicky if you moved em by hand. tiiny adjustments, not so much movements
I'm curious what the limit is for the amount of mass you could push with a laser and how much power you would need to move large masses. This reminds me of the classic tractor beam where you have a beam of light that holds a spaceship in place and can even pull them closer.
This is mindboggling, because in the same object (this ball) light behaves both as a wave and a particle. Makes me realize how little we understand what the universe is, and the great lengths we went to try to understand them.
@@ronaldderooij1774 Don´t be. The guys who invented the transistor famously did not depriving IBM from controlling the world and PhDs are often considered public.
I would love a series of videos in which each professor explains his specific field of research and his current work, I think would be really interesting.
I remember seeing this in the local paper. Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ. The really old guy was once a high school teacher in Holmdel High School. Bell Labs, Holmdel no longer exists and was abandoned a while but now is in a revival as a telecom research and business office building with housing around it. If you want to read about it, look up Arthur Ashkin in the Asbury Park Press. When Bell Labs shut down, many of the employees became teachers and professors in our area. Many of my science teachers who are older worked there when I was in HS.
I apologize - haven’t read the paper but I’ve got a hypothesis RE the question about momentum transfer: Refraction occurs due to molecular transformations in the glass altering the electric field part-way constituting the photon (collectively summarized by dielectric constant of glass). This deformation suffices to explain momentum transfer. Brilliant brilliant work to all scientists and grad students on this project.
I love that these nobel prizes, especially the first one, are easy enough to be understood by high school students! Props to the winners and thanks prof for the explanation :)
@@PolemicContrarian 1)laser can reflect from ground might work 2)Cow have gravitational pull so if you will light not cow, but area around it then light should be get bend by gravity of the cow. So now it move under some angle, which means it lost some of its downwards momentum. And by laws of conservation cow should be accelerated up. P.S.: i know that you just can't make this powerfull laser without destroying half a universe, but whatever
I was using optical tweezers back in college. It was used to turn and rotate cells. I was also using electricity standing waves to do the same thing. But these lasers were more troublesome than the electricity method. So just replace the glass bead with a human cell and that is what I was doing.
Amazing stuff and it's great that students are being rewarded as well. It's got to sting a bit for past students having been over-shadowed because it's hard to parse thoughts and effort during semi-collaborative PhD level research.
Noble prize!!!!!!!!!!!! I always believed that understanding this would be not my piece of cake but this video is an eye-opener. The best-simplified explanation that I ever came across.
Someone in an earlier comment names this speaker as Prof. Merrifield, Thank You, Prof Merrifield, for explaining this so well. Very interesting. Love & Peace to All
When you run water over a boiled egg in the bottom of a pot, I've noticed the egg will tend to roll itself into the stream, ending up basically centered under the water. I only noticed this recently, and found it really funny that it wasn't something I'd heard about growing up as, like, some pop science tidbit from Bill Nye or something. Maybe it's common knowledge, and I just missed that episode...
It's similar to how a strong stream of air can capture a capture a round object. If the fluid hits the round object off center, it will follow the curve and pull the object towards the center of the stream (the result is even stronger if the object can spin) I think some demos were done with a ping-pong ball and a hair dryer
Glad to see you bring out that an interference pattern was needed to create the short burst, but does the initial laser pulse naturally develop the best frequencies to create this interference pattern?
I really really like this video and the simplicity of your way of explaining it. It is a must-watch video I will share with my students in my course! Thanks.
The phenomenon taking place here is dielectric pressure. Light is a 3-property field expression. Electric, magnetic, and dielectric. The electric and magnetic are two sides of the same coin. Electromagnetic pressure mediation. The dielectric is the field medium itself that is in oscillation via a causal source. We can call this medium the electrostatic field but it is more accurately the dielectric field. What is measured as a photon and the property that has momentum and inertia is the dielectric field medium when perturbed. The longer we exclude the dielectric field from electromagnetism the longer physics will be clueless for answering the "why" questions of electrical physics.
We use it to measure protein denaturation energy, to understand the changes it needs to make to catalyze a reaction, a biochemist assembled it himself!
This seems like an optical version of floating a ping-pong ball in the middle of a stream of flowing air. The ball is stable within the beam precisely because, if it happens to wander off-center for a moment, it deflects the air flow in just the right direction that the recoil pushes it back towards the center. There are also some experiments on "sound levitation" on TH-cam that perhaps are an acoustic analog of the optical tweezers.
I find it so hard to fathom how physicists can use single particles and molecules in their experiments and measurements. Maybe you could do a video explaining it!
I think the ease to understand it also makes a great case for continuing to add diversity to science. These may have been simple enough ideas for anyone to understand but there also probably wasn't many people who knew these were issues that could be addressed - especially the second case with amplifying light.
I gave a round of clapping in real life for the genious the not-moving-back-and-forth method was for the laser tweezer. That's really freaking genious.
that is so cool .. darn! in those moments i seriously love physics! if you want to get more people into stem .. show them such hands on, brilliant solutions for physical problems.
While watching another Sixty Symbols video (Feynman Diagrams) I followed up a passing reference to a guy called Stueckelberg. Now I'd like to suggest a video about Baron Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg von Breidenbach zu Breidenstein und Melsbach, to give him his full name. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Stueckelberg developed the vector boson exchange model as the theoretical explanation of the strong nuclear force in 1935. Discussions with Pauli led Stueckelberg to drop the idea, however. It was rediscovered by Hideki Yukawa, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in 1949 - *the first of several Nobel Prizes awarded for work which Stueckelberg contributed to, without recognition* ".
This video reminds me of my chemical instrumentation class in college... Hard to believe someone just won the Nobel prize for "simply" adding a diffraction grating to a previously engineered light amplifier, but I guess if it was so simple then why didn't I think of it first?
There was a several hundred year gap between the invention of the screw and the screwdriver. It can be surprising how hard it can be to discover what is in hindsight obvious.
I thought of something else. if you could shrink the first idea down enough, you could make a helluva accelerometer out of it. one bead for each direction, or better yet, three lasers on one bead, and it could come up with a direction-vector and magnitude.
DFX2KX It is being looked into for this purpose! I don’t know a whole lot about its progress, but for a similar concept currently being pursued for accelerometers, look up cold atom interferometry.
@@PulsedPower that makes me happy to know. You stick two of those on the mirrors of LIGO, and you'd be able to detect and filter vibration extremely well! Which for an interferometer like LIGO would make their job easier
Ok for the conservation of momemtum, but what about the conservation of energy ? If momemtum (energy)is given to the sphere then what happens to the light that passes through the sphere ? How did it lose energy ? Did the wavelength change ?
Wavelength increases. However, because the bead is so much heavier than the photon, very little energy is transfered. Imagine the photon is a small ball and the bead is a boulder: when the ball hits the boulder it bounces off with the same speed and same energy, however it did transfer double its momentum to the boulder because it changed direction.
There is no solid that can be 100% clear to a wavelength of light, therefore it will absorb some of the electromagnetic energy as it passes through. Since light has momentum, and that must be preserved, the glass bead will gain a net increase in momentum away from the light source, and grow warmer as it absorbs energy. The scientists simply used clever lenses to adjust the angle of the net momentum gain of the bead to work in their favor.
In principle, the bead balancing optics to be used for analysing Gravity is an interesting way of measuring modulation effects equivalent to the circumstances around Black Hole Events. And the splitter-amplifier must be the start of an Optical Quantum Fields Modulation Mechanism Computer? "Brilliant "!
So now we are finding a way to conduct experiments on a small scale. This sounds to me like we are getting closer to unifying quantum theory and general relativity which could mean that we are very close to a grand unified theory. I am very excited.
Just out of intrigue, isn't the principal of levitation mentioned in the video very much similar to acoustic levitation. But I know for sure that in acoustic levitation you need nodes of interference from different frequencies to levitate things can't see how that happens for a laser.
The 'tweezer' seems to have a venturi effect, around the sphere, (or maybe inverse venturi), and the sphere looks to have a positive bouyancy in the beam. I may be reading too much into it.
Fascinating. So presumably by measuring the movement of the sphere in the beam researchers should be able to design gravitometers to measure micro changes in gravity. If this is the case I assume that with sufficient resolution you would be able to measure inhomogeneities under the earth surface. Say waterpipes or mine shafts?
More physics Nobel Prize videos: bit.ly/SSNobel
The 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry: th-cam.com/video/fMKtFKphuds/w-d-xo.html
Lazer tweezers are Amazingk, just dont install them on Cats! \o7
5 mins? I'd listen to Dr. Merrifield talk for hours!
Sixty Symbols i would place a strong neodymium magnet near it to see if you can move it out of the light beam? 🤔🧲 🤷♂️
+Sixty Symbols
Do more nobel prizes please :D
This is so nice!! Keeps me up to date with new and important physics ideas quick and easy. Love it!
great animation and wonderful discussion -- thank you for sharing
*Making* such tiny spheres and lens is what impresses me the most...
Your lens could be bigger than that and the transistors in your phone are way smaller than this sphere so it is possible. But yes very impressive
Spheres are easy; controlling the exact size might be tricky, but you can just make a lot and then sort them. The lens might be harder, depending on size and shape.
this two can have great implication... in weapon industry i can imagine...so lets destroy ourselves:)
also that they can attach one end of DNA to that lens
You can buy them off the Internet for cheap. We used them for human cell dummies. Lot more sanetary and prepared use fit the real thing.
"Alright, he can keep his Nobel Prize"
You're too kind.
That part was funny!
Ohh it was his comment not your , i was going to comment ( that - Are you jealous ) you before knowing that 😃😄
11:32 later he said " i can win the Noble prize "
Dude, Donna strictland was my electromagnetism prof last year.
Which uni?
@@-_-8229 U Waterloo (Canada)
@@raintrain9921 oh cool.
Thank mr goose.
I'm in physics at u waterloo as well my man
What kinda fascinates me is how simple (on paper) this idea is, despite it's originality. It doesn't require much knowledge on the specifics to understand it, as it's literally just refraction and conservation of momentum and I'm fairly sure even a high schooler could understand the processes involved
12:04
Until you do the engineering part ...
the true is , it is difficult once you really understand what did they do. He just put it on lame terms for the average high school student to understand , but this is HARD to do.
@@The4stro same, have never taken physics, but the idea is so simple it is easy to understand
Engineering is where the real applications begin. And horrors to unveil.
I was invited to Gerard Mourou's lab once about 15 years ago. It was quite impressive. I got out of the laser business to do robotics, but it was a lot of fun back then.
Ok?
Brady was pretty challenging this time! I commend Michael Merrifield for his patience.
I love his questions tho. They teach me a lot as well.
I love your interactions with all people you make videos with. It seems like you have bonded over the years.
As a young Australian aspiring to be a filmmaker, all of Brady's videos are very inspiring. Keep up the great work!
After watching this I thought: Wow! Both of these actually Nobel-worthy ideas are so simple, yet so well explained here, that it makes one feel like any old layman could have come up with them and grabbed that prize... But of course "Understood instantly" does not mean "Able to invent". Question: How well does the glass ball suspended in a beam of light handle movement of said beam? Rotation, withdrawal, acceleration, etc. Say; If I point my laser slowly away from it, will the glass ball follow along? And what is the speed limit here? Rate of change; can it be high? As fast as light speed, perhaps? Or a non-epsilon magnitude / medium-sized fraction of it? Example: A sudden 180° will likely drop or launch the ball, losing it; but a subtle focal length adjustment or a nanometer push/pull will not. The subject will be re-centered by the various forces as shown in the animation.
Let's do a ballpark estimate. The limiting factor is how much acceleration can the beam put into the ball. The ball has known mass (m) and the laser has known power (P). Movement perpendicular to the beam is stabilized by the refraction. Let's assume the ball is perfectly transparent and that there is a position where it refracts the full beam perpendicularly. The acceleration of the ball is a=F/m. The force provided by the beam is its power divided by speed of light F=P/c. So the maximum theoretical acceleration of the ball is a ~ P/(c*m).
Off course in practice it will be less. We need to take into account absorption, the fact that the refracted beam is divergent, the fact that horizontal refraction may not be possible etc. All of these are some factor ~0.001.
We now may substitute some numbers. Wavelength of the laser is l~10^-6m. Volume of the ball is V=l^3=10^-18m^3. Density of glass is ro~1000kg/m^3, so the mass of the ball is m=ro*V~10^-15kg. The power of the laser is P~1W. Speed of light is c~10^8m/s. The acceleration is a~0.001*P/(c*m) ~ 10^4m/s^2 ~ 1000g.
I probably underestimated the size of the ball significantly. But nevertheless, the force seems to be strong enough that you can probably walk around with the suspended ball, but probably not enough to shoot it out of a cannon.
I would imagine that it wouldn't have a hard speed limit, but rather a point where it's accelerating so slowly it's basically not accelerating at all anymore (then a practicality limit where the laser will refract over a long enough distance). The closer it gets to the speed of light, the more energy it's going to need to accelerate. At some point this will mean that the tiny force being exerted is still technically speeding it up, but not really in any measurable way. Objects with mass cannot reach the speed of light because the energy requirement to speed it up approaches infinity as you get closer it. Might start out kind of fast though, the fact that they can hover it means it's counteracting it's natural 9.8m/s acceleration towards Earth.
I got some pretty amazing mathy replies. Thanks guys! I really appreciate the free education you've given me this day. + Make sure you click "Show more replies" and "Read more" on each of them, to learn like I did. Especially comments by Victor Titov, KohuGaly, and psmitty840. Huge thumbs up to you all.
@@x3ICEx it should track the beam if done slow enough, but you gotta look at the scale, tiny glass beads might be finicky if you moved em by hand. tiiny adjustments, not so much movements
I'm curious what the limit is for the amount of mass you could push with a laser and how much power you would need to move large masses. This reminds me of the classic tractor beam where you have a beam of light that holds a spaceship in place and can even pull them closer.
These videos are the most inspiring thing in my life.
I feel sorry for you.
"...so simple and because of that so elegant..."
exactly the point of great science
This is mindboggling, because in the same object (this ball) light behaves both as a wave and a particle. Makes me realize how little we understand what the universe is, and the great lengths we went to try to understand them.
My faculty advisor is a Biophysicist and was excited when this Nobel Prize was announced!
can't help but notice prof Merrifield changing with time. Been watching this channel from the start,basically growing up with these people.
This second NP looks so much like a patentable invention rather than a discovery.
Yes, and I think it was patented. I would be amazed if it wasn't.
@@ronaldderooij1774 Don´t be. The guys who invented the transistor famously did not depriving IBM from controlling the world and PhDs are often considered public.
@@ronaldderooij1774 it is not patended. you can build your own cpa laser system and sell it.
The invention of Laser tweezer is a great idea. Deserves the Nobel prize. Congratulations.
He was right, y'know. Each of these two concepts took on average about five minutes to explain.
I would love a series of videos in which each professor explains his specific field of research and his current work, I think would be really interesting.
I remember seeing this in the local paper. Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ. The really old guy was once a high school teacher in Holmdel High School. Bell Labs, Holmdel no longer exists and was abandoned a while but now is in a revival as a telecom research and business office building with housing around it. If you want to read about it, look up Arthur Ashkin in the Asbury Park Press. When Bell Labs shut down, many of the employees became teachers and professors in our area. Many of my science teachers who are older worked there when I was in HS.
Yes, there is great ingenuity in making extraordinary material advancements starting from the obvious approach.
wow, a teacher that can actually teach. Prof Merrifield is great at distilling the concept down to an approachable morsel.
I apologize - haven’t read the paper but I’ve got a hypothesis RE the question about momentum transfer: Refraction occurs due to molecular transformations in the glass altering the electric field part-way constituting the photon (collectively summarized by dielectric constant of glass). This deformation suffices to explain momentum transfer.
Brilliant brilliant work to all scientists and grad students on this project.
I love that these nobel prizes, especially the first one, are easy enough to be understood by high school students! Props to the winners and thanks prof for the explanation :)
I love how elegant and simple the amplifier is.
2:47 that auto correction method reminded me with the belt on crowned pulleys correction mechanism in a mechanical system.
Also similar to railway tracks.
The UFO lightcone in cartoons, picking up cows must work this way!
If the cow is round enough and doesn't get toasted on the way up...
Well, maybe they're just looking for some delicious earthly beef.
No, as both gravity and the force of the laser are pushing them down - the opposite direction.
@@PolemicContrarian 1)laser can reflect from ground might work
2)Cow have gravitational pull so if you will light not cow, but area around it then light should be get bend by gravity of the cow. So now it move under some angle, which means it lost some of its downwards momentum. And by laws of conservation cow should be accelerated up.
P.S.: i know that you just can't make this powerfull laser without destroying half a universe, but whatever
I was using optical tweezers back in college. It was used to turn and rotate cells. I was also using electricity standing waves to do the same thing. But these lasers were more troublesome than the electricity method. So just replace the glass bead with a human cell and that is what I was doing.
Hey..how come same light is deflecting in two different directions..one upwards and one downwards?
It's not only a pair of tweezers it's also a scale or an attenuator or a pressure gauge all types of uses can be made of that how brilliant
Amazing stuff and it's great that students are being rewarded as well. It's got to sting a bit for past students having been over-shadowed because it's hard to parse thoughts and effort during semi-collaborative PhD level research.
Rudolf Mössbauer also got his Nobel prize for his PhD thesis work, actually receiving it 3 years after his defence. And that was back in 1961.
This channel is so amazing, makes me feel like I'm still in touch with physics
With all the infotainment rubbish on youtube, its a pleasure to see some gem quality offerings. Thank you!!!!
Noble prize!!!!!!!!!!!! I always believed that understanding this would be not my piece of cake but this video is an eye-opener. The best-simplified explanation that I ever came across.
It's like how the Bernoulli effect holds a ball in a airstream. Only with light.
and without the air passing through the ball...
nah not quite
Exactly like that! Nicely done.
Darik Datta exactly what I though, I use to levitate a pingpongball with a hairdryer when I was little kid
Ah, see, that's why I find it so hard to move when it's bright outside. Great info, thanks! I will stay inside now.
Someone in an earlier comment names this speaker as Prof. Merrifield, Thank You, Prof Merrifield, for explaining this so well. Very interesting. Love & Peace to All
How do you glue a molecule?
In soviet russia molecules glue YOU
Maybe with static electricity
Airfix cement
Flex tape
Elmer’s
It’s probably some kind of chemical bond
Best channel to underdstand every year's nobel prize
I like this Merrifield fellow. He's quite intelligent in his explanations.
When you run water over a boiled egg in the bottom of a pot, I've noticed the egg will tend to roll itself into the stream, ending up basically centered under the water. I only noticed this recently, and found it really funny that it wasn't something I'd heard about growing up as, like, some pop science tidbit from Bill Nye or something. Maybe it's common knowledge, and I just missed that episode...
What exactly do you mean?
It's similar to how a strong stream of air can capture a capture a round object. If the fluid hits the round object off center, it will follow the curve and pull the object towards the center of the stream (the result is even stronger if the object can spin)
I think some demos were done with a ping-pong ball and a hair dryer
The momentum comes from the time lost in slowing the light through the sphere in order to refract it
I miss sixty symbols's videos, kindly upload them more frequently
This is such an amazing channel. Complex ideas explained in a way that anyone can understand. Thank you for all the amazing work.
I have to give a presentation on this in a week, and the explanation here is incredibly helpful. Thanks so much!
Glad to see you bring out that an interference pattern was needed to create the short burst, but does the initial laser pulse naturally develop the best frequencies to create this interference pattern?
this channel helps me live my life
I really really like this video and the simplicity of your way of explaining it. It is a must-watch video I will share with my students in my course! Thanks.
Love these coffee-chat style talks. Super informative but super casual
Well, it sure _felt_ like a five-minute video ;)
false.
Oh neat. I remembering reading about this easily a decade ago. Glad they got recognized.
The phenomenon taking place here is dielectric pressure. Light is a 3-property field expression. Electric, magnetic, and dielectric. The electric and magnetic are two sides of the same coin. Electromagnetic pressure mediation. The dielectric is the field medium itself that is in oscillation via a causal source. We can call this medium the electrostatic field but it is more accurately the dielectric field. What is measured as a photon and the property that has momentum and inertia is the dielectric field medium when perturbed.
The longer we exclude the dielectric field from electromagnetism the longer physics will be clueless for answering the "why" questions of electrical physics.
As with most Nobel Prize winning concepts: the solution is so elegant, I could have invented it myself
We use it to measure protein denaturation energy, to understand the changes it needs to make to catalyze a reaction, a biochemist assembled it himself!
Somewhere in the Dan Simmons 'Hyperion' series they briefly describe a white laser used as a spotlight from the distance of AU
Very clear explanation. Thanks to Destin for pointing me to this!
the interviewer doesn't seems very bright in physics but his ability to scrutinize the facts and then ask uncanny questions are commendable
Can you do a actual double split experiment that would be the coolest thing on TH-cam
This seems like an optical version of floating a ping-pong ball in the middle of a stream of flowing air. The ball is stable within the beam precisely because, if it happens to wander off-center for a moment, it deflects the air flow in just the right direction that the recoil pushes it back towards the center.
There are also some experiments on "sound levitation" on TH-cam that perhaps are an acoustic analog of the optical tweezers.
Extremely well explained
I find it so hard to fathom how physicists can use single particles and molecules in their experiments and measurements. Maybe you could do a video explaining it!
I think the ease to understand it also makes a great case for continuing to add diversity to science. These may have been simple enough ideas for anyone to understand but there also probably wasn't many people who knew these were issues that could be addressed - especially the second case with amplifying light.
I gave a round of clapping in real life for the genious the not-moving-back-and-forth method was for the laser tweezer. That's really freaking genious.
that is so cool .. darn! in those moments i seriously love physics!
if you want to get more people into stem .. show them such hands on, brilliant solutions for physical problems.
Force diagram would have helped us understand more easily. Thanks for the explanation though :)
He explained it in terms of momentum...
So optical tweezers are a Piezoelectric locking or rather balancing effect.
Brilliant all around
Great video! Smarter Every Day sent me over here, and now I'm a subscriber.
Great video. Explained in a very amazing and intuitive manner.
Styropyro did this optical tweezers experiment a while back with a diamond
While watching another Sixty Symbols video (Feynman Diagrams) I followed up a passing reference to a guy called Stueckelberg. Now I'd like to suggest a video about Baron Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg von Breidenbach zu Breidenstein und Melsbach, to give him his full name.
Quoting from Wikipedia: "Stueckelberg developed the vector boson exchange model as the theoretical explanation of the strong nuclear force in 1935. Discussions with Pauli led Stueckelberg to drop the idea, however. It was rediscovered by Hideki Yukawa, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in 1949 - *the first of several Nobel Prizes awarded for work which Stueckelberg contributed to, without recognition* ".
Thank you this was easy to understand and helped me loads.
Can't be explained more clearly than that
This video reminds me of my chemical instrumentation class in college... Hard to believe someone just won the Nobel prize for "simply" adding a diffraction grating to a previously engineered light amplifier, but I guess if it was so simple then why didn't I think of it first?
There was a several hundred year gap between the invention of the screw and the screwdriver. It can be surprising how hard it can be to discover what is in hindsight obvious.
Awesome explanation and great questions
Why wasn't there a 2016 & 2017 Nobel Prize video?
Wow, can’t believe I live so close to such a great place like Bell Labs
Please explain an experiment on reversibility if fluid motion
NORMALIZE THE MIC INPUT PLEASE I'M LISTENING OUT LOUD ON SPEAKERS THANK YOU
It’s about time!
I thought of something else. if you could shrink the first idea down enough, you could make a helluva accelerometer out of it. one bead for each direction, or better yet, three lasers on one bead, and it could come up with a direction-vector and magnitude.
DFX2KX
It is being looked into for this purpose! I don’t know a whole lot about its progress, but for a similar concept currently being pursued for accelerometers, look up cold atom interferometry.
@@PulsedPower that makes me happy to know. You stick two of those on the mirrors of LIGO, and you'd be able to detect and filter vibration extremely well! Which for an interferometer like LIGO would make their job easier
Ok for the conservation of momemtum, but what about the conservation of energy ? If momemtum (energy)is given to the sphere then what happens to the light that passes through the sphere ? How did it lose energy ? Did the wavelength change ?
Most likely the bead was heated up slightly.
Wavelength increases. However, because the bead is so much heavier than the photon, very little energy is transfered. Imagine the photon is a small ball and the bead is a boulder: when the ball hits the boulder it bounces off with the same speed and same energy, however it did transfer double its momentum to the boulder because it changed direction.
There is no solid that can be 100% clear to a wavelength of light, therefore it will absorb some of the electromagnetic energy as it passes through. Since light has momentum, and that must be preserved, the glass bead will gain a net increase in momentum away from the light source, and grow warmer as it absorbs energy. The scientists simply used clever lenses to adjust the angle of the net momentum gain of the bead to work in their favor.
If only more people had access to tech and resources these guys have.
"Uncovering multiscale order in the prime numbers via scattering". This is in need to be discussed, please
In principle, the bead balancing optics to be used for analysing Gravity is an interesting way of measuring modulation effects equivalent to the circumstances around Black Hole Events.
And the splitter-amplifier must be the start of an Optical Quantum Fields Modulation Mechanism Computer? "Brilliant "!
So now we are finding a way to conduct experiments on a small scale. This sounds to me like we are getting closer to unifying quantum theory and general relativity which could mean that we are very close to a grand unified theory. I am very excited.
Just out of intrigue, isn't the principal of levitation mentioned in the video very much similar to acoustic levitation. But I know for sure that in acoustic levitation you need nodes of interference from different frequencies to levitate things can't see how that happens for a laser.
Such a great explanation!
When you think about it, once you understand that photons have momentum of a sort, this is easy as pie.
I love these guys! Great questions and great explanations
Fascinating. Thanks for this.
Wow i tought this was known before. I was doing experiments at home in 2017, trying to hold smoke particles in the beam.
The 'tweezer' seems to have a venturi effect, around the sphere, (or maybe inverse venturi), and the sphere looks to have a positive bouyancy in the beam.
I may be reading too much into it.
this is extraordinary.
This is a very informative videos about this topic. Really really mind-blowing and easy to understand this clever new discovery in Physics
Now that's what i want in my recommended.
so easy to understand!!
As soon as he said its brighter in middle at 1:55, I figured it out :D. Glad to know my brain is working lol
Fascinating. So presumably by measuring the movement of the sphere in the beam researchers should be able to design gravitometers to measure micro changes in gravity. If this is the case I assume that with sufficient resolution you would be able to measure inhomogeneities under the earth surface. Say waterpipes or mine shafts?
Fascinating to say the least!