What's your favorite color? For me, most of the time, it's Cherenkov blue.
I was catching up with a friend and we started talking about the nature of real photons vs virtual photons. Thought about it for some time and realized that one way to describe the relationship between real and virtual photons was to recall my favorite color.
For particles traveling faster than the speed of light in a medium (such as water), traditional electrostatic interactions, which would normally be governed via the exchange of virtual photons, yield real photons of a blue hue. I also remembered what happens with fuel rods that "are leak-proof and thick enough to stop the beta rays of radioactive decays" due to their cladding enclosing. This cladding lets "some gamma rays penetrating the storage pool. Interacting with water these gamma will produce electrons by Compton effect." That is, "If they are fast enough, these electrons will produce a flash of blue light by Cherenkov effect." [redberry.cc] [radioactivity.eu.com]
In the atmosphere, "Cosmic radiation, on the other hand, contains electrons, positrons and also very high energy muons that can produce Cherenkov light flashes. This Cherenkov light is used to detect cosmic showers."
[radioactivity.eu.com]
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.My lab experiment was to use Neutron Activation Analysis to determine the fluorine content of teflon. I scraped the lining of an old pan into vial, and this went into a pneumatic conveying tube to be irradiated by the pile. The fluorine transmuted to neon which has an 11 second half-life. When the tube came back, it was too 'hot' to handle. When the radiation dropped enough, we had to scramble to get it into the detector before it all radiated away...
racocn8
Level 9
Sep 22, 2020
0
Turquoise. Any greenish blue shade I think, perhaps a little more blue, but yeah.
Captain_Feelgood
Level 8
May 14, 2020
1
Brings to mind Chernobyl.
[express.co.uk]
If you haven't seen the HBO series, worth your time.
NoMagicCookie
Level 8
May 14, 2020
1
Right BUT as per the Warp Speed used in Star Trek the actual technology is NOT to travel as fast as or faster than light but to 'warp' space so that it 'bends' the space between destinations thus simulating, for want of a better term, being able to travel great distances in the shortest possible time.
If I remember correctly, that was a theory that Einstein posited when he worked out his famous E equals M xC squared calculation.
Triphid
Level 9
May 13, 2020
1
@Triphid - Yeah, this brought up some good conversation on the Alcubierre drive and metric. 
[en.wikipedia.org]
[arxiv.org]
@SergeTafCam I love this quotation from the article you sent: "...a bubble macroscopically large enough to enclose a ship of 200 meters would require a total amount of exotic matter greater than the mass of the observable universe, and straining the exotic matter to an extremely thin band of 10−32 meters is considered impractical."
OK, yeah, pretty impractical, one would have to agree. But impossible? No scientist would dare use that word!
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