• ominous ocelot@leminal.spaceEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    Oh, so it is not about the indirect path? Light taking the direct path would still be slower than in vacuum? What slows it down?

    • cynar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      It’s quantum mechanical, so the maths gets complex. It can be simplified in a useful way however.

      Basically, atoms can absorb photons and then re-emit them. You can think of the photon flying past at C, but getting absorbed and emitted along the way, adding delays. In QM however, neat particles don’t exist, it deals with quantised, probabilistic waves. The above effect gets blurred over the waveform. No one atom definitely absorbs it or doesn’t, it gets blurred together into a general slowing of the wavefront.

      • ominous ocelot@leminal.spaceEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Like toll booths on highways. Understood.

        In QM however, neat particles don’t exist, it deals with quantised, probabilistic waves. The above effect gets blurred over the waveform. No one atom definitely absorbs it or doesn’t, it gets blurred together into a general slowing of the wavefront.

        That’s exactly the amount of QM I can understand. Which means I don’t understand QM. ;)

    • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.caEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I haven’t looked into it recently, and the only answer I recall is “because”. Ultimately, the higher the refractive index, the slower the speed of light in that substance. As for fiber optics, the 0.66 c, which isn’t a claim I made, could be in part due to reflection increasing the path length, or it could be net speed including repeaters/amplifiers, or something else.

      • ominous ocelot@leminal.spaceEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Repeaters and refraction explain a lot. The remaining slow down of light - if you factor those effects out, feels a bit magical. The effect isn’t as big as on Pratchett’s Disc World, but the air actually slows down the light. And fiber does too.

        Disc World wiki:

        Light is so oddly affected by magic, as it passes into the Disc’s atmosphere, it actually slows down from millions to hundreds of miles an hour. One odd effect of this is that the Disc has time zones, when, as a flat world, it shouldn’t. Another effect is that, as reported in Thud!, the red- and blue-shifting of light becomes noticeable when travelling at speeds of merely a hundred and twenty miles per hour.