The red ball is likely the heat glow of the object it hit, which doesn't mean an explosion, but incandescence. Lightning itself is glowing because of the incandescent effect of 30,000K temperatures on the gasses of the air + the refraction of air itself. Many of the objects in an around our houses are very rich in carbon, and carbon glows red, orange and yellow depending on the temperature. Add in the very white effect of lightning at close range and wallah, you got yourself a pretty red/white "explosion". That is my guess!

>> ^Fantomas:

This showcases raytracings strengths of reflections, refractions and other light effects really well. I still think rasterised rendering is more than capable for current gaming.


I tend to agree, but ray tracing has always been the holy grail in both visual quality...and attainability. For what I remember when I cared, accelerating such a process is rather difficult. I believe, though, rasterisation is still done in "ray tracing" environments, but the lighting model is pure ray tracing; which I believe is a recent break through in rolling out ray tracing engines (see photon mapping). Time to google more ray tracing stuff, forgot how pretty it was

This showcases raytracings strengths of reflections, refractions and other light effects really well. I still think rasterised rendering is more than capable for current gaming.

Looks like they also have the same refractive index as water since they're pretty much invisible when submerged.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

So... am I the only person on Earth who can open his eyes underwater or...


No, but index of refraction of water is very close to the index of refraction of your eye, which is why you can't see clearly under water. Air->eye is very different from water->eye, and you can't focus properly. So this dude's blowing air bubbles in front of his eyes, which lets him get something more similar to normal vision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_vision

On a side note: There is significant push by Nader Engheta and other to explore materials with refractive index near zero.

This stuff is pretty interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial

There is so much wrong with this crap. I can't even begin to explain.

@ForgedReality. I am not going to go knee deep into this. But I think you have misunderstood a few things. First, dispersion or the index of refraction of many materials is frequency dependent. Ironically, my graduate research focused extensively on this! In it's simplest form, the dispersion relation is (w/k)^2 = (c/n)^2. That means that the group velocity is limited by c. So in a medium where the refractive index is nonzero the speed of light is less than c. Frequency dependence further complicates the issue. It implies that the refractive index is different at different frequencies. Hence, light at one frequency has a different group velocity than light at another frequency. This has been known since Hertz. It was explained by Einstein.

Lene Hau's experiments at the Rowland Institute are a little more difficult to explain.

It is a little easier to explain something related to her experiments: Bose-Einstein condensates. Naively, you can think about light as billard balls. If you hit one ball moving at a given velocity in a given direction with an identical ball moving in exactly the opposite direction and same velocity, then by momentum transfer you can cancel the motion of both balls. When you do this with light you create a Bose-Einstein condensate.

This is not accurate. As far as we know, light (a photon) is massless and its speed does not change based on frequency (color). However, its speed does APPEAR to change with frequency because of its interaction with matter (we call this refraction). Similarly, its apparent speed will change depending on the type of matter it is traveling through.

However, the photon is not actually slowing down. Rather, it interacts with other particles, bounces around, then emerges some time later. It does all of this at the speed of light, but the particle appeared to slow down because it was "busy" interacting with whatever medium it was traveling through.

Actually, what's really interesting, and more accurate, is that the photon that "comes out the other side" is not the same photon that went in. The original photon no longer exists, because it was absorbed by the material, at which point a number of interactions happened, and another photon was emitted. There are countless numbers of these interactions occurring when light travels through matter, and countless numbers of photons being created and annihilated before the photon that we actually observe comes into being.

>> ^ForgedReality:

Light doesn't have one set speed. Each frequency of light travels at slightly different speeds. I've long had this theory, and NASA has since confirmed it. We have detected very slight differences in the time it takes different frequencies of light to travel a set distance.
As such, we cannot say light has "a" speed, but rather a range of speeds. Therefore, could it also then be possible that the speed of an individual photon can be adjusted by various means in order to either speed up or slow down?
The answer is yes. Scientists have managed to slow the "speed of light" all the way down to 38mph. How is this possible? Well, as light has mass (albeit, a very miniscule amount), it will slow when traveling through a material, such as water, glass, oil, or even air. Passing the light through a super-dense, ultra-cooled material magnifies this effect.

You can also try putting glass balls or marbles into glycerine, they have a very close refraction index. MAGIC!

>> ^RadHazG:

anyone know what that green halo is?


That is refraction at its finest. It also turns yellow, orange, and red (ect) because of the position of the camera relative to the sun and the atmosphere. The atmosphere really is just like a big ocean in the sky, and as such, you get to see all sorts of colors at the right angles, like an earth prism. I watch a lot of shuttle feeds btw

I just took a test on refraction on Friday. Thanks for posting this AFTER my test...dick.

@marbles

Radar requires line of sight (with slight deviation due to atmospheric refraction) so, yes, you would be able to determine the coverage of each station with rather high accuracy just by knowing its location and the surrounding topography.

I also think it was a waste of time for the hijackers to change the transponder codes. I can only guess it was paranoia that drove them to do this. I think you're getting ahead of yourself when you say "somehow the hijackers knew where the gaps were". If they had, then why did only 2 of 4 planes change transponder codes while they were in dead zones? It's quite possible that this was pure coincidence. It's not like these planes even changed course to fly into dead zones. Their regularly scheduled courses brought all of them into dead zones.

I'd like to point out that, were the planes under remote control as is being alleged, it still wouldn't make any more sense for the transponders to be reprogrammed mid-flight.

I said he was either dishonest or ignorant and the one issue we've discussed is not the only reason I came to that conclusion. The entire video; indeed the entire truther movement, from what I've seen; is based on the flawed premise that all explanations that can be imagined are to be treated equally. I fully expect there are truthers out there who believe that aliens teleported onto the four planes and locked them on their course before teleporting back to the safety of the mothership. No doubt this was done to bankrupt the US, halting our space program before we could threaten their civilization. And we'd all be expected to treat this theory with the same credibility as "terrorists hijacked the planes and flew them into buildings because they were pissed off about us occupying their homelands."

Ultimately there were two reasons I did not want to participate in a discussion on this topic and I will say I seem to have been entirely wrong about one of them. That was my expectation that you could not keep this civil. Kudos to you on that.

The other reason is that there's just nothing of any interest or note coming from the truthers. It's all wild speculation backed up by claims that said speculation hasn't been investigated and/or disproven. You get to have your ideas heard by participating in these discussions, but what do I get out of it?

I learned a few things about the history of heavy-duty 'clearing solutions' for seeing bone in animal tissue (modify the optical index of refraction such that light of visible wavelengths travel easier through animal tissue)...

google search for:
CLEARING SPECIMENS FOR THE DEMONSTRATION OF BONE
R. W. CUMLEY, J. F. CROW and A. B. GRIFFEN (1939)

or, if you need to see them bones faster...

A RAPID METHOD FOR CLEARING AND STAINING
SPECIMENS FOR THE DEMONSTRATION OF BONE
MARGARET C. GREEN (1952)

>> ^xxovercastxx:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/Estuffing17" title="member since May 2nd, 2010" class="profilelink">Estuffing17
Actually, because visible green light is at a higher energy level than red light, if an objects energy gap is high enough to let green light through, then red light will also pass through because it has even lower energy levels, not the other way around.
That's exactly what I said in my example.
As far as a translucent green material is concerned, when we perceive an object to have color, it is because that objects atoms are arranged in such a way that it reflects that wavelength of light (green in this case) back to our eye, while either absorbing, refracting or letting pass through photons of other wavelengths. Just because a piece of glass is green does not mean it will not allow other higher and lower energy photons to pass through it.
Green glass, as I understand it, is green because it's filtering out other colors. It's a simplified example, yes. Obviously you can have a little yellow or blue or whatever mixed in and it still looks "green".
But the energy gap explanation seems to mean that "green" glass would be letting all red, orange, and yellow light through since they are lower energy levels. It's one thing to say a little bit of another color is coming through and it's imperceptible. If all the "weaker" colors are coming through along with the green, it doesn't seem to me like it would look very green.


All the light at all the energy levels will pass through the material, you're right. But the extra bit that makes this make sense is that this isn't the only thing happening. You've seen a simple explanation of one thing. The other wavelengths of light are passing through the material, but not all in a straight line. Their paths are diverted and dispersed so you don't get a meaningful amount of these wavelengths of light entering your eye.

This is the reason the sky is blue. Light is refracted by particles in the substance through which it is traveling. The closer the wavelength of the light is to the particles it's being refracted by, the more it's course is altered. The blue end of the spectrum has the closest wavelength to the size of particles in the air.

When you look at the sky with your back to the sun, the light that makes it to your eyes will obviously have had to have it's path altered a lot by the particles in the air. Only the wavelengths that are closest to the size of the particles in the air will be altered this much, hence the sky looking blue.

The lower the sun, the more air there is for the light to pass through and the more the other wavelengths will be refracted. At midday on the equator the sun in a white dot surrounded by blue. There isn't enough air between you and the sun to cause anything other than the blue light to be refracted back to your eye, so if you're not looking at the sun (not good...) you're only going to see blue. At sunset there is a lot more air between you and the sun, enough for the longer wavelengths to be affected, hence the red colours spreading away from the sun causing the firey sunsets we all love.

So, to sum up; just because all the wavelengths of light can pass through something it doesn't necessarily follow that they aren't affected in any way at all. They can pass through but have their paths altered, hence the different colours you see.

I'd love a fuller explanation of this. How do the particles affect the protons? What makes them alter course?

>> ^eRadthorpe:

If this is so then why is glasses opacity different from alternate angles?


I think because the surface of the glass comes into play then causeing refraction/reflection etc. If you ignored the polished surface, the inside of the glass wouldn't change in opacity.