The Most Reflective Mirror In The World
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- Опубліковано 25 вер 2024
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I'm sure our distant ancestors would be gratified to see that even after thousands of years, people are still excited by shiny stuff.
It's called Shiny Object Syndrome
hi jhonbus have you become a flat earther yet?
😂😅
OOH SHINY * neuron activation *
So you're saying there is a small piece of this material in every cell phone with a screen?
*exits to disassemble old cell phone.
Dielectric mirrors are used in gas lasers because they're nearly 100% reflective. The dielectric coatings can be tuned to the specific wavelength of the laser.
Is there a way to aim a laser through the mirror at another mirror for an attempted infinite beam bounce reflection? 99.5% is close,what if it was 100%?
@@pyrocrabb12 Yes thats how a laser works in most cases. Between those two mirrors (also called resonator mirrors, the whole thing is a resonator) is a laser medium. For gas lasers it is some type of gas for example helium and neon. For solid state lasers it is some type of crystal like Ti:sapphire. To get the actual laser light out of theses media, it has to be pumped. Pumping means in this application, that you take some kind of light source with the right light spectrum, shoot it into to the resonator where the light passes through the medium many times, absorbs this light and energetically excite parts of the medium into a higher state. This state is not stable and the media gets rid of the energy in form of light. Then the medium is in his energetically base state, where it can be excited again. Since these resonator mirrors doesnt reflect 100% of the light, you can make them so thin, that a tiny amount of laser light escapes through a tine hole (not in the mirror but in the housing behind the mirror) and can use for experiments. In general a laser needs much more electrical power than comes out of the laser as optical power. They are quite inefficient. The reason we use lasers is due to the long coherence length, where most of the light has the same phase and wavelength. We have a ideal, predictable light source. We can also build optics without major optical aberrations and therefore focus the light into such small spaces, that we achieve optical power densitys of MW per cm^2 and more.
This description lacks some details, because of my language barrier and some details being a little bit difficult to explain.
@@pyrocrabb1299.5% isn’t close to 100%! It’s infinitely far from it. The intensity will be only 1% after 918 bounces: log(0.01)/log(0.995) = 918.7
Percent left = (percent reflectivity/100)^bounces
99.9999% would be 1% brightness after about 5 million bounces.
@@float32 Is 100% possible?
@@pyrocrabb12 Kind of, it's called an optical cavity. You don't actually need a fancy way to get the light in, you can just straight up shoot it through the first mirror. Sounds weird, but it works:
The ~0.5% that don't get reflected, instead go through the first mirror and enter the space between the mirrors (the cavity). This light will bounce back and fourth between the two mirrors for a while. During that time, more and more light is leaking through the first mirror, so that the light inside the cavity actually builds up quite strong (this only works at a specific wavelength!). In fact it will be much stronger inside the cavity than the original laser beam you sent onto the first mirror! If you get the alignment right, actually the light inside the cavity will be so strong that the little bit that leaks back out (so also the ~0.5%, but this time from the inside to outside) will be exactly as strong as the original laser you sent in.
So on the first mirror you have the ~99.5% light being reflected directly, but also the light leaking back out of the cavity. These two beams will cancel each other out entirely, because light is a wave. So you actually have no reflection at all! The second mirror also leaks ~0.5% of the light, so you have a beam as strong as the input laser coming out of the second mirror.
(TLDR:) Which means: if you get the wavelength and alignment right, it's as if the two mirrors were completely transparent! No matter how reflective they actually are! I personally got about 5% of light transmitting through two mirrors with a reflectivity of around 99.9998%.
Also you can just make the light inside the cavity. That's what pretty much all lasers do.
I wanna see a car wrapped with it...
oh god thats evil
That's gonna be the new BrIgHtEsT IDeA.
Gosh that’s just pure op
invisible
You just invented a new crime
the accidental discovery of the rolled up dielectric behavior during a meeting is always fascinating. love hearing about these things.
"fidgeting", as it's commonly called, is a valid scientific process...
I wander if that engineer is one one of many who worked for the DOD in order to create the invisibility camouflage for military ships. If that’s the case than I doubt it was really a accidental discovery.
The important part is understanding that the visual result you get was unexpected even for an expert and therefore worth further research.
This reminds me when i was kid, one time i was folding a clear plastic bag to have similar effect
the meeting was BORING to say less.
I’m wondering how this would look in a room of the darkest paint when used with a single small light source.
modern art
@@Enhancedliesgod
Very dark, you would just see the walls which are black
@@Enhancedlieshow the translation?
@@lbgstzockt8493 I love living in a room of ⬛
The technology for making this material (some very fancy laminar flow extrusion dies) was developed at Dow Chemical's Michigan Division in the mid 1980's. As usual, Dow couldn't find their butts with both hands and didn't think it would ever have a large enough market to be worth their time, so they sold it to 3M. Fun fact, if the two different polymers are both transparent elastomers, then you get a wavelength selective reflector that can be adjusted by stretching (which makes the individual layers thinner). The pieces I saw demonstrated could go from fully reflective in visible light to fully transparent with about a 3X stretch. In between would give some interesting polychromic Moire patterns.
That's interesting, thanks! I would have thought they just sputter coat them, but this is way more economical
And now I want to see what happens if you wrap a car in the elastomer version and apply different stretch/tension across it. Would be a pretty funky look.
@@2lstGun At the time I saw the stuff demonstrated at Dow (late '88 or early '89), they had been working with Ford for a few years and they showed a Taurus that had a lower layer count film (like a partially silvered one-way mirror) molded on to the exterior of the turn-signal/marker-light assemblies and applied to the windows. The rest of the car was polished and clear coated, giving the effect of a seamless silver bubble. Sort of the ultimate urban camouflage, although driving a near invisible car seemed like the worst idea ever (about what I would expect from a Dow/Ford collaboration).
hi @robertlapointe4093, I am currently working on a product in optics which requires high reflectance, is it possible we could connect if you are interested?
@@samj4971 I was not directly involved in the project and only got a glimpse of the products they were making, so I doubt I could be of any help. I am not sure if 3M is making any of this material now or not. Searching for 3M reflective material only brings up links to their retroreflective products, which I suspect is not what you are interested in.
In 2012, I used to run the largest cell phone service and repair store in the country. I frequently disected screens and never knew what that thin reflective backing was for! That's so cool, I knew how backlighting worked and at one point realized that phone displays went from having multiple visible led lights that would be brighter at the edge of the screen, to suddenly not having any visible light and a homogeneously lit screen.
What country?
@@OPOS-el7tj Vatican
Since this material is so flexible, I would love to see a _cylindrical_ room with the wall(s?) covered with it!
I always thought what it would look like in a perfect mirror like bubble that ur inside of
pull up your selfie cam and point it at a mirror...
Well if you turn on a light, you'll probably get blind.
...or a room-size unilluminable room
you mean a Kozyrev Mirror?
i wonder if this would improve the effect of an infinity mirror. since the near side has to be a one way reflective mirror film some brightness will always be lost with each reflection, but it should make the effect brighter over all and give a deeper infinity
There's actually no such thing as a one-way mirror, I'm afraid...
Yes, it would improve the performance but there is more to the story. I think you are talking about a "first surface mirror." In a first surface mirror, the reflective coating is appled to the side facing you ( for facing the second mirror in an infinity mirror setup.) A first surface mirror is far more reflective than a standard mirror because with a standard mirror, the light has to pass though the glass to get to the coating, the it has to reflect off of the coatiing where there is some loss, and back though the glass. Standard float glass has a transmission of only about 90% so the loss from each mirror would be considerable, so yes, you use first surface mirrors for a good effect. The problem with using dialectic is that it is very expensive to apply so a large infinity mirror would be super expensive. It would indeed improve the depth of an infinity mirror though. A cheap infinity mirror gets dark really fast because they are using standard mirrors. An infinity mirror made with high enhanced, protected aluminum will do almost as well at a far lower cost, but it would still be quite expensive for a larger mirrors. (Enhanced Aluminnim with special coatings can have a 93% reflectiity, so that is not all that much less than dieletcric, but even protected enhanced aluminum is fairly expensive, thouhgh I have no doubt that it would be less than a dieletric of the same size.
The principle even works for (soft) x-rays - I used it 30 years ago to build x-ray lasers. For harder x-rays, crystals can be used.
X-rays can be soft or hard?
@@AuxiliaryPanther Soft x-rays vs hard x-rays is a question of their energy. Typically soft x-rays are considered those that have energy up to about 10 keV (kilo electron-volt). The border between extreme UV light, soft x-rays, hard x-rays and gamma rays is not strictly defined: it mostly depends on applications or the type of light sources, but the more energy, the "harder" the radiation gets.
@@AuxiliaryPanther I used to think hard water meant ice. I wasn't wrong!
@@SwissPGO okay, so higher amplitude x-rays are "harder". Thanks!
@@AuxiliaryPanther Hmmm, not "amplitude" but energy of the photon, amplitude is not a term used very often in relation to light sources. Brightness would be a better term. Brightness relates to the amount of photons emitted, not the energy of the individual photon, so there could be equally bright soft and hard x-ray sources. The terminology soft vs hard x-rays is related to the energy of the individual photons. Shorter wavelength photons have more energy, and have a deeper penetration into matter before they are absorbed, scattered or reflected. Thats why they are called harder than longer wavelength photons. it's like comparing a nerf gun's ammo (soft) to a 9mm bullet (hard).
Imagine using this in a solartube or something like it, to bring natural light deep into buildings
That would work, I like it.
What an amazing video! yet another case of 'how amazing the stuff is around us that you don't even know' explained in a concise video.
The reflective effect layering has on this polymer reminds me of mica rock. Its reflective and shiny but you can peel off the thin rock layers and each of them are transparent! I wonder if a similar effect is going on there?
Pikes peak has a lot of that stuff.
Had the same thought about mica. On another level, x-rays telescope use several layers of metal sheets in order to reflect them
Good observation. The crystal structure probably is doing something very similar, but locally limited to more particular angles than the randomized structure of the polymer.
Just as amazing as the darkest/most light-absorbing materials, the most reflective! Didn't know about this, what a great video! Thanks a lot!
It would be so cool to see you make a mirrored room like you've done before made of this stuff.
That would be amazing
Was gonna say this too 😂
@@InstagramUser420Google translate fails on this post.
Might be pretty expensive.
@@InstagramUser420 Oh, a wild edgelord appears!! *yawn
The ending explanation is just like the fur on polar bears. There's a bunch huddled togather to make a polar bear look white. While in fact, polar bears have black skin and transparent fur.
I wonder if they could lay this material down on a rigid substrate to make a telescope mirror?
Incidentally, pinching the tubed mirror to turn it into a mini "flashlight" is an awesome demonstration of how cats' eyes get to see so well in the dark.
You touched upon those mirrors that can be used to reflect a specific wavelength of light, I would have liked to hear more about those!
I used to work in color darkrooms that has both additive and subtractive color enlargers, so I can already foresee modern uses, but your take and research would be fascinating.
Thanks.
Gotta be careful when touching on those mirrors- you might leave a fingerprint and cut down on their reflectivity!
It's already used commonly for lasers.
@@TheUnderscore_ I figured as much, and can appreciate some high gains in efficiency for a relatively low cost material.
They are the most used mirrors in optics laboratories. They are pretty cheap nowadays, just look on thorlabs or similar distributors. I don't even remember when I last used a metal mirror.
Making them reflective for just a small range of wavelengths is actually much easier than making a broadband mirror. But it's just thin film optics, if you stack enough layers you can make any arbitrary wavelength filter. Usually when they are specifically made to be very reflective for some wavelengths and very transmissive for others, they are called dichroic mirrors.
"99.5%" isn't a hard limit either. If you stack enough layers (aka pay the manufacturer enough) you can make stupidly reflective mirrors. We have some that reflect all but ~2 millionth of the light, so 99.9998% reflectivity. But really except for optical cavities, the 99% you get from something like a BB1-E02 is more than enough
They're called dichroic mirrors
The first thing that popped into my head was all those infinity mirror crafting projects. How much better would they look using this type of mirror? Or course this stuff probably costs as much as a used car for anything larger that and a playing card.
It's not so expensive, found some for $30 for 11"x11".
This 3M ESR film isn't sold to the public unfortunately It is only sold to manufacturers that use it in products. And they wouldn't tell me who they sell it to. Dielectric mirrors in general, are available but not as high reflectivity as this 3M one.
@@TheActionLabwhy are they unwilling to sell to the public?
@@mxcollin95Probably has something to do with it being a relatively newer product without a lot of research to be able to know what potentially could go wrong if it got into the wrong hands. That barrier would quickly get broken if there were a huge public demand, but if there isn't a huge demand, the manufacturers may just want to protect themselves from some frivolous lawsuit from somebody that used this film on a slightly curved window of his house and ended up starting a fire inside his neighbor's house because it focused the sunlight to a dot through a window to a wall at 30 feet away inside his neighbor's bedroom. A mirror could theoretically do the same thing, but nobody could sue a mirror manufacturer, because normal mirrors have already been in use for countless decades. But this film is quite new and untested in raw public wholesale. So they probably just don't want to end up getting sued over something stupid like that. Or maybe if somebody used it to make a weapon, the manufacturer could get sued unless this product gets recognized as a standard household material first.
@@HeyChickens ya…good points.
Uh oh. You know what comes next right? "This is the most reflective room in the world."
I wouldn't say that it's made of a "bunch of different layers that aren't reflective at all". I would say rather that it's made of many different transparent layers that are partially reflective to a certain degree, such that when you add all the layers together, you achieve this effect.
This channel is gold
Wow, again a mindblowing quickie on something I hadn't ever heard about. 👍
Though I did get lost in the transition, how we went from a spaghetti-like structure that seems to reflect all kinds of ambient light very well, to a precision structure of flat layers that's tailored for reflecting a particular wavelength...
I don't think he claimed that a single layer of the 'spaghetti' material was reflective -- apparently it is transparent.
I believe he only mentioned the 'spaghetti' in regards to polarization -- in this case the non-polarization of light.
Anyway, as I understand it, the film is many layers (of varying thickness) of the transparent 'spaghetti' material and that's where the reflectance comes from.
Now go in a room surrounded by those mirrors
When I was in high school I was entered into a science competition.
My project was to illustrate Brewster 's Law which states that you get maximum polarisation of the reflected light when the tangent of the angle of incidence is numerically equal to the refractive index of the reflecting medium.
Thank you for the happy memories from the December 1973 Aer Lingus Young Scientists Exhibition.
Seems like this would make a great reflector for telescopes. Lightweight, cheap (comparatively), and easy to work with. Just need a solid backplate for it you could construct out of a suitable material of your choice.
it looks like the secondary reflections have the same angle, but are offset by some distance from the original reflection. I think that would cause point light sources to look blurry/hazy on a curved mirror. Apparently it will work fine for flat mirrors, there are 90-degree eyepieces that have this as well as binoculars which have two 90's per eye.
Especially if it could be made in a parabolic shape. Also for the type of telelenses that use mirrors it would enable some really lightweight long telelenses
It would not be easy (or probably even possible) to shape it to the right figure. A mirror, to be actually usable in a telescope, must have its surface shape (and roughness) error lower than about 100 nanometers or better (for visible light), and must be rigid enough not to deform under its own weight and ideally not expand/contract when temperature changes.
It's relatively easy to achieve that level of precision when polishing glass (it's also can be done with metals, but they have much higher thermal expansion), and when you cover it with vaporized aluminium it has about 92% reflectivity in visible light - but there actually are dielectric mirrors used in telescopes, but often not for main mirrors, but rather eg. in diagonals (though you can get a higher reflectivity coating for your main mirror if you want and have money for it); they are made of glass coated with thin layers of dielectric material, so they work like what we see here, but also keep the shape of the glass.
Dielectric coatings are more expensive though, and 99% vs "only" 92% isn't an improvement enough to make it vialabe option for larger mirrors - it probably would be cheaper to make a slightly bigger, aluminium coated mirror to compensate for slightly lower reflectivity. Or you can simply expose your target for a little longer to gather more light, which doesn't cost anything.
I know that in most telescopes there are two or more mirrors actually, so loss of light is somewhat greater due to multiple reflections, but still good old aluminium is the most cost effective.
@@Krzysztof_z_Bagien so light weight tele lenses for cameras is perhaps more obvious - though not simple...
@@rasmus619 same rules apply to photographic lenses. I don't really see how this stuff could be used in optics that wouldn't be to much trouble to be worth it. I'm pretty sure its surface quality isn't anywhere near what you need to make an optical mirror.
But maybe I'm wrong.
I've seen a lot of this reflective films, but I never actually checked how it is made. The fact that it doesn't contain any metal is something didn't know. The mechanism is easy to understand, just never thought of it.
That's pretty neat. I wonder if this material could be tuned to reflect IR but allow visible light to pass through. I'd love a film to apply to windows that keeps the heat out without blocking the light. The existing commercial options seem to have mixed reviews.
and in cold areas it should switch
3m is badass. pretty sure they're responsible for literally tens of thousands of crazy materials
I know for most LASERs similar products are used both for the reflector and the output coupler. Out of curiosity have you tried putting a piece of that on both ends of a lasing material to make an open cavity laser? Maybe niodimiun YAG and a flashlight with a blue bandpass filter
In my telescope setup, the diagonal is made with a dielectric mirror. The difference is noticeable against a regular diagonal.
That reminds me when I put many nylon sheets atop one another, I end-up with a blurred metallic sheen, and not a murky milky color. Of course, the nylon sheets are too thick and the alternating nylon/air interface between the layers does not have the right thickness and refractive index. On the other hand, what if you use instead of a polymer a much more transparent material like the one for fiber-optics? Another question, does it let light through if directed at a right angle?
Very true! I hadn't thought about that! It does look like a mirror when you stack those sheets together!
Wow! I finally know what that shiny film is inside all those electronic devices I have taken apart over the years. Learn something new every day!
I got some of the 3m dichroic film. It shines red green or gold depending on viewing angle but transmits blue violet and purple and is extremely reflective
But when stuck to a mirror all the color destructively interferes and it vanishes.
This is why this is used in telescope accessories like diagonals to minimise any light loss :) Which is super important for light that is already crazy faint.
So now you make a room out of this mirror and compare it to the black 3.0, right ?
I wonder if this could be used as a reflector behind the halogen lamps in car headlights.
It seems like a good application.
I can imagine so many possible magician’s applications of this item if it’s scalable! Beyond the mirror uses, this can possibly be a form of “white art” in contrast with the commonly used black art.
Regular horticultural mylar has a reflectivity of around 98%. And it's cheap and can be big. But seeing what magicians already do with mirrors, I think they have something better
I would like to use this material on my next telescope build. I've never been happy with the cost or quality of sputter coating on my custom first order mirrors.
This is one of the most fascinating items I never knew about until now! Could it be used to increase the output of solar panels? It just seems like there are so many applications this could be used to enhance, from LEDs to optical devices and much more! What a great video and thank you.
Yeah! Fascinating thought!
That's amazing that such a significant development in the Brewster angle came from something so mundane as a guy being bored at a meeting! 😅
I was wondering if this mirror was the one used in the James Webb telescope and if not, what was. And also, wrapping a car with this material would be awesome! It could render it almost invisible!
JWST mirror was coated with gold. There were many requirements other than maximizing reflectivity. For example this is made from plastic and many types of plastic are releasing volatiles when placed in vacuum. They would foul up the precision optics.
wrapping just the skirt and air dam of a car and driving in the desert would make the car body appear to float like Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder
You should do a video explaining Dichroic Mirrors!
Oh wow, in the anatomy of the reflected film, it really feels a lot like a Dichroic Mirror.
Wow. This is actually super interesting. I bet that getting one framed must be incredibly expensive. I'd love to play around with some though.
I was expecting you to mention that the mirror on your wall is coated on the back,and the image you see is transmitted thru glass with a degree of disruption of light waves. Didnt mention that.
Interesting, I always thought that in order to make a "mirror" like that a metal *MUST* be included; I thought that was just some plastic with a very thin metallic coating!
It may seem like a small thing but thanks for mentioning that you got this as a sample.
So many science channels will show something and then I spend hours trying to find out where they got it from.
Since this was a sample given to you, I know that I probably don't need to spend hours trying to find it for sale.
I would love to see them roll up a 6 foot length of this material to replicate the "flashlight effect " ❤
C'mon 3M you know your own engineers have likely done it already dozens of times with that material, donate a few feet more "for the cause of cool stuff every deserves to get seen" 👍 (even if that cool stuff is highly reflective hahaha)
That's a great idea!👍
I've been wondering if they can use it to make a flashlight that doesn't need a traditional power source. I wouldn't know how to get the shape just right though.
Why would you need a flashlight in an environment that has light? @@FireChronos
All environments have light, it's just a question of how much. @@WalterSamuels
I'd love to see the videos about the room made of mirrors and the inside of a spherical mirror done again using this stuff!
Long time ago I've heard or read that the main difficulty in building large telescope is the weight of the mirror, which would inevitably deform under its own weight beyond a certain size. But if a mirror can consist in a simple polymer film, weight cannot be the issue, can it? Unless it's the supporting material that is the problem?
Glass can be ground at large sizes to exacting precision. The Hubble Space Telescope was 2.2 microns out of alignment at the edge and that crippled it. Try getting a precisely *curved* thin film polymer to maintain its exact curve and not be quasi randomly 2.2 microns out of alignment *everywhere* .
Great, thanks for this video, James! Now, I think a lot of us have seen thin plastic mirrors a lot before, but since this is a special type, I guess it would be a lot harder to get. How would we go about getting some of that?
He replied in another comment that 3M does not sell it to us commoners unfortunately. I had the same thought!
@@zapperone7: Oh, sorry I missed that. Well then I wonder how they set him apart of someone who "qualified." And I wonder why.
It reflects over 99.5% of visible light! So close to being able to see how truly bad I look in the mirror.
So the transparent layers can make an emergent whole that is the 'opposite': reflective. That's pretty cool material science as well as philosophically interesting!
please do an infinity room, I remember seeing an older video of yours that you did this with regular mirrors and said that due to the abortion of light it stops after just a few repetitions, but I really want to see this done with these mirrors :)
Explanation at 6:30 would mean that the interference effect will depend on the angle of incidence since path length in the medium is angle dependent.
Yep, it is! Narrow band dielectric mirrors (designed for only one wavelength) will usually only work at a specific angle. Same goes for dichroic filters that reflect/transmit certain wavelengths. The wavelengths they reflect/transmit will change with angle
Seems like this could be cool for some concentrated solar, even small scale.
Yes ! But let's see the price, and the weather resistance of the polymer.....
This man just figured out how to make invisible armor
I'm 40, I don't need a mirror that shows more of me...
When you look that mirror you see a refection of yourself.
excelente video, gracias por crear este contenido, sacas a la luz temas que son asombrosos y que nunca nos detenemos a pensar. 🤩🤯
“...an example where the sum of all the individual parts have different properties than the entire thing as a whole.”
I think there's a term in linguistics for this kind of error, which is extremely common, but I can't recall what it is. It's kind of similar to a garden path in terms of my experience hearing it.
Can you make a flashlight with it, be interesting to see how much the lumens increase
no
@@Ben_19MWhy not, the material is good on reflection.
@@jooei2810 i dont know
@@Ben_19M So that is double no, no on making a flashlight and no on that you don’t know if it actually would work.
Are you Dr. No by any chance?
@@jooei2810 i dont like flashlights
This is just awesome. To think that one can roll up a foil and then it looks like a small flash light just because it reflects light so well. Mindblow. What a time to be alive.
Ohh I'm sure a lot of people are going to start using this in gardens and greenhouses and stuff
Fresh picked strawberries in winter sounds like a fun thing to try with something to keep light reflecting around till the plants absorb it
Plants rely on more than just light to grow...
@@travispoulin252 I'm fully aware, I have an indoor and outdoor garden, compost, and fertilizer
Just in some places growing plants inside or starting them in the winter indoors it's the lighting that's usually *my* biggest problem
As it's a hobby and I can't afford industrial lights, and some get too hot in a small space, and air circulation... It's hard
I was not trying to say light is all they need
Just that's usually the biggest problem starting them indoors in winter/early spring
Or we'll at least for me...
And strawberries take 2 years before producing fruit so you'd have to put alot of effort into keeping them fruiting into winter instead of just going into their winter chill phase(I'm not a biologist so I forget the terminology)
Wow. Cool stuff. I remember the physics teacher showing us the surprising reflectiveness of a stack of microscope slides. Tip: they were nothing compared to this stuff!
Great video! Keep it up!
Having a mirror maze with this stuff sounds fun.
Dude I know your never going to read this but BETTER HELP is GARBAGE. Serious HOT GARBAGE. You should really re-look advertising with them.
Awesome! Can't wait to have 99.5% reflective microplastics circling around in my bloodstream... thanks 3M!
The problem with accepting sponsorship from a company like Better Help is that later, when you learn how much harm they've caused, it's too late. That ad will always mar an otherwise well-researched video.
Your videos are awesome. You deserve good sponsors.
Hey there, Action Lab!
I'm an Astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a big fan of your channel. Your experiments are always thought-provoking and entertaining, making complex scientific concepts accessible to everyone.
I've got a proposal for a unique experiment that combines astrobiology with your famous DIY approach. How about sending a DIY weather balloon to the edge of space, but with a twist? Along with the usual camera and GPS tracker, let's include a payload of tardigrades, also known as water bears.
Tardigrades are renowned for their resilience in extreme environments, including the vacuum of space. It would be fascinating to see how they fare on an edge-of-space journey. After the balloon returns, we could examine the tardigrades to see how they handled the conditions.
Now, here's my hypothesis: Given the tardigrades' known resilience to extreme conditions, I'd expect them to survive the journey. They might enter a state of cryptobiosis, where their metabolic processes shut down and they essentially hibernate until conditions improve.
However, the recovery and rehydration process after this journey would be the crucial point of observation. Understanding how tardigrades react post-flight could provide insights into how life survives and recovers from exposure to extreme environments. This knowledge could be significant in our search for life in the cosmos.
As always, it's essential to ensure that all safety and legal guidelines are followed during the experiment and that the tardigrades are handled responsibly.
Keep up the fantastic work, and I'm eager to see how this idea takes shape on your channel!
So, if you are in a small room that is completely covered in this material, and there is also a lightbulb lit in the room, what would you be experiencing? I'm thinking more along the temperature at the moment. That's a lot of energy that isn't being absorbed.
it's also an example of the fine-structure of an object can be more important than the material it's made of.
nano tech meets material properties...bloody fascinating imo
Thank you for making reflection clear.
I wish this guy was my science teacher!
"You're watching this from a cellphone"
Me, from my desktop PC: Ahhh yeah.... sure...
Alien spacecraft material
youtube's most wholesome educator.
I do have a couple of questions. Where can I buy it? I would like to put it on the back wall of my greenhouse to reflect more light back to the plants to help them grow as if they are fully exposed to the sun outside. Also, does it have the same effect with all wavelengths of light including radiant heat?
Time to pause and reflect on this astounding presentation.
It is perfect for you to teach. Thank you. Do not stop.
Afterthought: Such a rolled up tube with a light sensing diode at the end, would make a great motion detector. Varying the geometry of the cylinder, proportional to the desired covered, would make an adjustable motion detector.
How come? The whole point of the video was that this will reflect really well. So if we make a cylinder then the light at the far end will be the same amount of light that was hitting the near end to begin with. So our detector detects just the same as a diode placed in plain sight.
(The picture shown 2:35 clarifies what happens when the foil is rolled up in a slightly conical shape, so light doesn't even hit the far end. But it would, 100% of it, if the shape was a cylinder as you say.)
@@u1zha, Good point! I was thinking mainly of the adjustable motion detector, via the pliable surface. Not much to gain by trying to steeping the angle of the cone except to attenuate, and that's easily done electrically. Thanks for the correction.
This is the content i like to watch while high af. At some point i have to put the joint out and really start thinking.
So that the reflection does not weaken, but rather increases-we need a layer cake made of several different transparent materials, each with a thickness of a quarter of a wavelength. At each of the joints of the two materials, some of the light is reflected back. If all the outward reflections have the same phase, constructive interference will occur and the reflected signal will have the maximum possible intensity.
For good attenuation of radio waves, it is necessary that the size of the holes-cells in the Faraday cage-does not exceed 1/10 of the wavelength.
Next video idea : World's most reflective material vs world's darkest paint vs world's darkest flashlight. All dipped in liquid nitrogen with a superconductor or top.
Edit: forgot to add the vaccuum chamber.
That's crazy cool. Something I didn't know at all even as I'm in the midst of building a solar concentrator
A giant drum with this material as its surface... Pump out air, giving the drum surface a tight, concave bending, and incorporate tiny adjustments like those used on mirror telescopes, and you have an extremely light weight telescope mirror.
Great example of a meta material. In the lab, I used a light filter that used a half wavelength to pass a specific wavelength.
Imagine a whole room covered with this stuff.
I learned something new. Thanks for the thorough explanation.
It's time to make the room with all four walls, floor and roof covered with that material.
It blows my mind, that i had the wrong conception that only metallic or evenly highly conducting surfaces could reflect in my head for so long. Was taught that in university probaply by a tutor.
But the total reflection ?
@@marianl8718 knew that, but that is from inside a material and not from free space with 120 Ohm wave resistance.
@@thoreberlin 120 ohms or 377 ohms ? Total reflection is a rather complicated phenomenon. It is found that before the light wave returns to the medium from which it left, it goes a little outside this medium in the form of what is called an evanescent wave. The reflected wave is the result of an interference phenomenon. There is destructive interference in one direction and constructive interference in another direction.
That would make good material for a spotlight reflector.
This is called “total internal reflection” and is typical in prisms which are of course typical in reflectors and why fibre optics can transmit light over huge distances.
If we had some reflective enough material, we could make a delay line for light. It would reflect many times without too much losses , going for such a long distance in between, that it would exit after some noticeable time.
Extremely well explained!
6:55 😮 incredible conclusion
The magic of mirrors is the fact that you are looking at the electrons surrounding the atoms of the material , the photons are returned with great efficiency.
I am now stripping down my old phones to salvage the reflective layer!