3 body problem on Netflix. Science Review part 1. They start at a particle accelerator, and this is real. What you do is you take something like a proton, you accelerate it close to the speed of light. It’s possible because it’s very low mass. You collide these protons together and you see what happens. The Standard Model of physics predicts other particles will be made, and they will behave in certain ways. You can see a picture here of an example of what should come from that collision. But what we see in Episode 1 initially produces something that looks like what we’d expect. But then you see these red lines start to come in and the particles are deflected, the trajectories are changed, and we’ll get into the explanation of exactly what happens in a future video.
But one thing to note is that the physicists seem really depressed and sad that they noticed this. But that is not how a scientist would act if somebody ran one of these experiments and saw some new type of physics, something inexplicable. They would be incredibly excited. This is what science is about now, running an experiment, seeing what you do know and what you don’t know about the universe.
Next is the neutrino detector, so the giant pool that Shorty jumps into is actually a neutrino detector. So these are underground. A well known one is Super Cameo Kanda. It is in Japan. So neutrinos are everywhere. They’re these sub atomic particles that really don’t interact with anything. Right now you have hundreds of trillions of neutrinos that are just coursing through your body, not interacting with you at all. How do you detect something like that? You build a neutrino detector. It’s a giant tank of water deep underground, and every once in a while, one of these neutrinos will interact with a water molecule and produce a little bit of light. This is real. These neutrino detectors are real. And I’m pretty sure that if you jumped off into that water, so this is pretty grounded as well.
But now we get into something a little more interesting, and that’s using the sun to amplify a signal to send to an alien planet. The problem with sending a signal to another planet is that the signal gets weaker and weaker. The further it goes, falls off in power with the square of the distance. All that means is that the further light travels, it exponentially decreases in power. So a signal that I send from earth will not be as strong of a signal when it reaches somewhere else.
Now, if you want to build a more powerful signal, what you could try to do is use the sun to amplify that signal. But how would that work? Well, we do know that because of general relativity, a massive object like the sun warps space and time. We know for a fact that stars, for example, can act as sort of magnifying glasses for the light that is coming in behind them. We see this in astronomy. And remember that a radio wave is just a light wave. It’s just a long wavelength of light. So conceptually, if you can magnify visible light with an object like a star, you should be able to magnify radio waves. We don’t have the technology or understanding to do this because you have to have everything aligned up perfectly, right. You can’t just shoot a radio wave at the sun, and the sun knows to magnify it and send it off to the right direction to hit the planet. You shoot it. And you’d have to have everything configured and lined up perfectly so you wouldn’t be able to just be sitting in a radio tower and do it and have it go to the right place. And even if you could, there’s another problem, and that’s that if you are able to amplify the signal, you still have the problem of solar noise. The sun is producing electromagnetic radiation all over the spectrum. The sun is producing lots and lots of noise. It’s producing lots of signals. So even if you were able to amplify the signal, it would kind of be like being at a concert and turning up your phone to play some music. Like, yeah, you could amplify the music on your phone, but it’s really gonna be getting drowned out by the concert. And in this example, the sun is the concert. So I’ll say that this one is conceptually, it is grounded in science. But as far as application goes, I don’t think this is possible. The next video I’m gonna talk about those virtual reality headsets and the actual problem of the entire show, which is that planet orbiting those three stars.