
Scientists observe light acting like a river - kinnth
https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-observed-light-flowing-like-a-river-and-it-s-beautiful
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eganist
Not to ask the dumb question, but one of the challenges discussed in the lay
video is that it's hard to study when the medium is consistently prone to fail
(pop)

What's stopping this test from being attempted on a frozen bubble? My guess is
that the crystalline structure of ice is different enough to change the
behavior of light, but at the same time, a lot of the variances in the
thickness of the bubble would be preserved, no?

~~~
bawana
This is reminiscent of the branching pattern seen in a plasma disc. (you know
those things that are flat versions of plasma globes) As I understand it ,
emission from a plasma requires a high energy electron dropping to a lower
energy with photon emission. The path of the 'collapsing energy' is linear -
meaning each emission event triggers one nearby- unzipping a river of lower
potential in a sea of high energy plasma. Interestingly, the directional
changes of branching plasma seem to occur at sharp angles with relatively
straight paths connecting the branch points.

With light however, the cascade of photons is fractured into separate rivers
as bundles of photons are refracted continuously by the smoothly varying
thickness of the bubble. Freezing the bubble might create crystals where the
thickness is not smoothly varying so angular paths might be observed as the
light jumps from one crystal to the next

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munro
I hadn’t heard of sciencealert before, so I clicked the home page and it’s
full of click bait content. Very high noise, low signal stuff, and the ads are
just awful.

> Plus, if the video can be looped, it'll make for an absolutely baller
> screensaver.

This line in the article really got me, lol, and made me question the source
of information.

Some other articles:

> There's a Weird Structure in Our Inner Ears That Hardly Anybody Talks About

> That 'Human Bone' Found in a NASA Mars Photo Isn't Even New. Here's The Real
> Story

Here’s a link to the actual paper:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2376-8](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2376-8)

