Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, of
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says there's
Speaker 1: a light in the darkness of everybody's life. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Folke Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today
Speaker 1: we wanted to talk a bit about tractor beams. As
Speaker 1: it turns out, tractor beam. Yeah, tractor beams. So, so
Speaker 1: we're talking about science fiction. No no, no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: that would be a later podcast. Right now, we're talking
Speaker 1: about science fact, science fact factor. Tractor beams. Yeah, tractor
Speaker 1: beams are a real thing. Yeah, using fact like f
Speaker 1: a k T fact exactly like f a k T.
Speaker 1: So you're you're telling me, they're telling you're telling me
Speaker 1: they're a real tractor beams in the world. It's amazing
Speaker 1: to me that you don't know this because you wrote
Speaker 1: the script for that particular episode and I've already recorded it.
Speaker 1: But yes, there are. Do you just not believe your
Speaker 1: own research. We're playing a little fantasy game. I'm sorry, Okay, yes,
Speaker 1: what tractor beams? Well, I'll admit that even though I
Speaker 1: did write a script about it. It's still blowing my mind.
Speaker 1: You know what. It blows my mind too, because you're
Speaker 1: sitting there talking about a phenomena that is incredibly counterintuitive,
Speaker 1: right right, Well, I mean, you know when when we
Speaker 1: see it in Star Trek, it looks like this beam
Speaker 1: of light is pulling something towards it. And how does
Speaker 1: how does that work? Because light pushes on right, Well,
Speaker 1: we actually are talking about light. I don't want to
Speaker 1: nerd out on you, but in star in wait, did
Speaker 1: you say Star Treker star Wars? Oh? Then you're right,
Speaker 1: You're totally right. You're totally right. I'm so sorry. I
Speaker 1: thought you said Star Wars and I was gonna be
Speaker 1: You don't see anything, okay, you just feel it. You're
Speaker 1: just being pulled in, right, They got us locked in,
Speaker 1: that's true. Yeah, they got us locked out of the track.
Speaker 1: You don't see waiting until one is right there over
Speaker 1: at the tractor beam controls that are rightly located next
Speaker 1: to the enormous pit, that big beam going up and down. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I will save that for the next podcast, all
Speaker 1: the sci fi stuff. Just just let it be known, okay,
Speaker 1: for the like one person in the world who doesn't
Speaker 1: know what a tractor beam from science fiction is. It's
Speaker 1: a force that pulls you toward it, right, right, So
Speaker 1: in science fiction it's often used for a ship to
Speaker 1: be guided into the docking bay of some other vessel
Speaker 1: or spaceport, or it's some way of capturing another object
Speaker 1: peacefully without blowing it to smithereens and kind of grabbing
Speaker 1: it taking it with you. Yeah. Yeah, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of like a nons like a like a beam winch right, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you don't want the equivalent of having to fire
Speaker 1: out grappling hooks from the side of your spaceship so
Speaker 1: that you can pull some other spaceship in so you
Speaker 1: can board it and and be space pirates, then you
Speaker 1: need some sort of electronic electromagnetic version of that. And
Speaker 1: and tractor beams tends to be the go to um
Speaker 1: magical thing that we talk about to have this happen.
Speaker 1: And as it turns out, we actually have developed a
Speaker 1: type of tractor beam, a couple of different types of
Speaker 1: tractor beams, but they're on a very small scale and
Speaker 1: they use light. Astonishing, Yeah, they use light. They use light,
Speaker 1: so they can shine light and pull something toward the
Speaker 1: light source, which is incredibly counterintuitive. Like you were saying, Lauren,
Speaker 1: I mean the light is something that pushes, right, It
Speaker 1: has momentum. It behaves as both a particle and a way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's even that's not totally intuitive, right, we should stop in.
Speaker 1: Some people might be going, wait a minute, what light pushes? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does. It does have momentum. It has a relativistic mass,
Speaker 1: which mostly means it as a mass that works out
Speaker 1: in math, if not in what we would consider real
Speaker 1: life situations. But it does have momentum. It can press
Speaker 1: against something. Yeah, you call this the term is radiation pressure.
Speaker 1: So you if you imagine the Sun, it's got raised
Speaker 1: coming out of it in all directions. It's also got
Speaker 1: solar wind. So you can understand why solar wind would
Speaker 1: push because that's massive particles. So that's a little lasting
Speaker 1: particles out into space. So if you have something like
Speaker 1: a solar sale, which is a spaceship that's designed to
Speaker 1: ride the force of the Sun outward from the solar system,
Speaker 1: that's taking some of the force from that solar wind
Speaker 1: those massive particles coming out, but some of the force
Speaker 1: pushing it is just all it's light Yeah, it's photons.
Speaker 1: It's just photons pressing against that solar sale. And because
Speaker 1: you're not dealing with gravity in any in any appreciable sense,
Speaker 1: once you get out into interplanetary space, as long as
Speaker 1: you're not getting too close to any particular large body,
Speaker 1: then you can use that to accelerate your spacecraft and
Speaker 1: and travel and use that as a propulsion force. In fact,
Speaker 1: that's one of the ones that that scientists have proposed
Speaker 1: as a potential propulsion force once we're building spacecraft in space.
Speaker 1: In fact, you don't even have to look at a
Speaker 1: hypothetical spacecraft to see the force of radiation pressure in
Speaker 1: our solar system. Right, you can look at like a comet. Right,
Speaker 1: Comets tails always point away from the Sun. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: That tail is always going to be pointing away. And
Speaker 1: that's because of this this pressure that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: So that's Kepler discovered that, by the way, which which
Speaker 1: comes up a lot in a lot of these articles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Kepler was a smart cat, let me tell you. So
Speaker 1: we're getting into a smart human being. But yeah, well
Speaker 1: Shortinger had a smart cat only half the time. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the the the whole point of this is that if
Speaker 1: you're thinking about an energy that has a pressure, like
Speaker 1: it's pressing against something, how could that then draw an
Speaker 1: object toward the source of that pressure. I mean, that
Speaker 1: is very much counterintuitive, right, And the thing is is
Speaker 1: that physicists have figured out ways of getting around this,
Speaker 1: so that what's really happening is the light is pushing
Speaker 1: on objects from behind and and thereby making the appearance
Speaker 1: that it's pulling that object towards right. So so really
Speaker 1: what's happening is that there's some sort of pressure building
Speaker 1: on the back side of an object in relation to
Speaker 1: where the source of light is, so that that pressure
Speaker 1: on the back is pushing it towards that light source.
Speaker 1: It's not truly pulling, Like It's not like if I
Speaker 1: grabbed Joe and then just started to pull him towards me,
Speaker 1: that that would be one thing. But this is more
Speaker 1: like I signal to you, Lauren, and I pushed Joe
Speaker 1: and towards you. By the way, this happens constantly in
Speaker 1: our podcast, and I meant to bring that up earlier
Speaker 1: suggest that we not do that, But really, I guess
Speaker 1: it's a discussion for another Come on, guys, the examples
Speaker 1: you're using are different in like eighteen ways. I want
Speaker 1: to see the proof. What does this really look like
Speaker 1: in the lab? What are they doing? All right, Well,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of different ways that scientists have looked
Speaker 1: into using light to uh to pull objects. First of all,
Speaker 1: we should say that for a couple of decades now,
Speaker 1: scientists have been using light to immobilize tiny, tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: object right, So they're they're not wiggle. So in this
Speaker 1: case you're using light. You're using light, it's not it's
Speaker 1: not drawing it towards the source of light. It's just
Speaker 1: there to either move something laterally, or you're just immobilizing something.
Speaker 1: This is really important if you're dealing with really really
Speaker 1: really tiny objects, like in organic chemistry or any kind
Speaker 1: of biomedical research, you would need to be able to
Speaker 1: to uh isolate and and uh and immobilize these tiny
Speaker 1: tiny particles. I imagine we're talking about like the microscale
Speaker 1: nanoscale is Yeah, microscale nanoscale is really what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Not keep in mind not so a nanometer is one
Speaker 1: billionth of a meter, uh, a micrometer is one million.
Speaker 1: So we're talking between the a few hundred nanometers to
Speaker 1: a couple of microns in size. Uh. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the ways that UH scientists have used is relying on
Speaker 1: something called a bessel beam, which is a very peculiar
Speaker 1: type of light. Yeah, a vessel beam. Uh. If you
Speaker 1: see a vessel beam shined against a wall, you would
Speaker 1: probably see something that looks like a target. It's like
Speaker 1: a bull's eye with concentric circles coming out. Um. But
Speaker 1: and that that's the way I've seen it in all
Speaker 1: the videos and images I've seen online. But the essential
Speaker 1: thing about a vessel beam is that it's non refractive, right,
Speaker 1: so it stays focused over a really long distance. And
Speaker 1: so if you're using a laser beam, we think of
Speaker 1: laser beams as being really really concentrated beams of light
Speaker 1: that don't tend to diffuse, but they do over great distances,
Speaker 1: whereas a vessel beam maintains that coherence. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: other really weird and kind of interesting thing about a
Speaker 1: vessel beam is that, if I'm correct, I think it
Speaker 1: reforms after passing over an object. Right. Right, It's a
Speaker 1: series of concentric circles of light that are formed around
Speaker 1: a single dot, and that center point is created by
Speaker 1: the light from the concentric circles, so it can it
Speaker 1: can your form when something want to encounter something that's
Speaker 1: path because it's not entirely being covered some of these
Speaker 1: I see, So some of the outer circle is getting
Speaker 1: around that object and therefore can reform that dot part
Speaker 1: on the back side of that object. So it's not
Speaker 1: the same thing as if it were to encounter, say
Speaker 1: an enormous wall. It's more like if it had a
Speaker 1: smaller object that would normally block that little dot, but
Speaker 1: some of that concentric circle gets around, some of the
Speaker 1: outer bits get around and behind. So the interesting thing
Speaker 1: here is that you've got a laser beam that for
Speaker 1: very tiny objects is uninterruptible, like it'll just it'll. If
Speaker 1: you were to interrupt that light, it reforms on the
Speaker 1: other side. It almost seems like magic when you think
Speaker 1: about it, because it's like, uh, you've you've blocked off
Speaker 1: that little dot from the source, and yet it still
Speaker 1: reappears on the other side of the object. So if
Speaker 1: a beam of light can reform on the other side
Speaker 1: of an object, I wonder if there's a way to
Speaker 1: time it so that when the beam hits the object,
Speaker 1: it's at a low energy in its wavelength, and when
Speaker 1: it reforms on the back of the object. It's at
Speaker 1: a high energy. Well, gosh, Joe, it's almost like you
Speaker 1: read that script you road, because in fact, that's exactly
Speaker 1: what scientists have managed to do. They've managed to exactly yeah,
Speaker 1: well with with with with two of these vessel beams.
Speaker 1: When you when you yeah, yeah, when you when you
Speaker 1: when you bend two of them together and kind of
Speaker 1: focus them correctly, right right. What happens is you you
Speaker 1: create a greater amount of pressure on the back side
Speaker 1: of this tiny, tiny object. Remember we're talking about on
Speaker 1: the micro scale here here. Uh, then you can create
Speaker 1: enough force to push it toward what is the source
Speaker 1: of that light. So, uh, it's exactly what you said, Joe.
Speaker 1: You've got a lower amount of pressure on the front
Speaker 1: side and a greater amount on the back side, and
Speaker 1: that's what creates this movement. So this is one way
Speaker 1: that scientists have discovered where you can actually use light
Speaker 1: to move objects. Now keep in mind this is tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny scale. We'll get into scalability issue. I know, Joe,
Speaker 1: you're chopping at the bit to talk about that, But
Speaker 1: we have another unusual and exotic way of using light
Speaker 1: to manipulate objects. And in fact, it's this the second
Speaker 1: method is incredibly technical, and we're really just going to
Speaker 1: give an overview of it because to go into great
Speaker 1: detail would one require that we'd actually bring someone in
Speaker 1: who is a particle physicist, a particle physicist, because that's
Speaker 1: how complex an optical physicist, Yeah right, you know, photons
Speaker 1: of particles. But or we could uh this fight later,
Speaker 1: geek fight um, or we can uh you know, so
Speaker 1: we've had to either bring in an expert or we
Speaker 1: would spend a lot of time gesticulating wildly in an
Speaker 1: audio podcast room, which does not translate so well in
Speaker 1: audio format. It's it would be fine for us, but
Speaker 1: y'all listening might be a little bit, right, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we'll do our best here. Let's let's talk about this.
Speaker 1: So it's this is from uh some some researchers who
Speaker 1: are working out of both Scotland and the Czech Republic.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a it's a it's a consortium of
Speaker 1: of scientists and engineers who are working on this. And
Speaker 1: and then this was just first published in on January.
Speaker 1: So this is really cutting edge. Yes, this is really
Speaker 1: really new and exciting stuff. But it's also the closest
Speaker 1: thing to the Sci Fi tractor beam that we've seen yet.
Speaker 1: It is and what's being used. They're using a Gaussian
Speaker 1: laser beam. A linearly polarized polarization is referring to if
Speaker 1: you think about the movements of a photon, they tend
Speaker 1: to move generally speaking, this is really simplifying, but they
Speaker 1: tend to move into planes, a horizontal plane, in a
Speaker 1: vertical plane. Polarized light you can you can polarize light
Speaker 1: in such a way so that it all moves within
Speaker 1: a single plane, and then you can manipulate that plane
Speaker 1: so that you are working with a very specific type
Speaker 1: of light. We actually use this in UH practically in
Speaker 1: three D applications. If you have passive three D glasses
Speaker 1: that are the polarized lenses, then those lenses are polarized
Speaker 1: in such a way to allow one type of light
Speaker 1: through the lens while blocking another type. This allows you
Speaker 1: to get two different um UH types of light in
Speaker 1: you know, one in each lens, so that your brain
Speaker 1: then combines the images that you're receiving into a single
Speaker 1: image that gives you that illusion of depth. Right, So
Speaker 1: it's it's tricking your brain into thinking that there's depth
Speaker 1: there when really you're just looking at two different flat images. Okay,
Speaker 1: but how do they use it so and to move
Speaker 1: a little balls. All has to do with the geometry
Speaker 1: of the light. First of all, we should say what
Speaker 1: they are doing. They are moving tiny, tiny, tiny little
Speaker 1: balls a little little styrene spheres that are suspended in fluid.
Speaker 1: And I think one thing that's interesting is a lot
Speaker 1: of these tests they seem to be dependent on the conditions, right,
Speaker 1: so like we can move something this size in air,
Speaker 1: or we can move something this size and a vacuum,
Speaker 1: or and in this they were talking about suspended in water,
Speaker 1: right And and this would obviously be something that would
Speaker 1: be interesting again in biomedical UH applications, where you're talking
Speaker 1: about lots of different fluids and particles that you might
Speaker 1: want to be able to move around. One of the
Speaker 1: cool things about this is depending upon the geometry of
Speaker 1: the light that they used, they could manipulate certain sized
Speaker 1: objects while leaving everything else alone. So you could be
Speaker 1: very specific and hone in on exactly the size of
Speaker 1: particle that you want to UH to manipulate while ignoring
Speaker 1: all other particles. Wow, I bet that makes a lot
Speaker 1: of people in medical apps salivate. Yeah, because you're talking
Speaker 1: about sorting on an incredibly precise basis very exciting, like
Speaker 1: a laser sifter, right right. What was really exciting to
Speaker 1: me about this research is that they said that under
Speaker 1: certain conditions, objects held by the beam would automatically rearrange
Speaker 1: themselves to make the pulse stronger. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that means. That's yeah, it's we're getting into star
Speaker 1: trek territory here with reversing the poet, and you're like
Speaker 1: brain washing the balls the polystyrene spears, your brainwashing them
Speaker 1: to do your bidding. Okay, all right, so these spears
Speaker 1: tended to be but for the for this particular research project,
Speaker 1: we're between about four and ten nanometers to one thousand
Speaker 1: nanometers or one micron in size, and one thousand nanometers
Speaker 1: that's huge to an atom. Yes, to us, it is
Speaker 1: incredibly tiny. It's pretty big for being pulled by light. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I being pushed around by photons. That's not bad at all. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can actually quote a little bit of this. So
Speaker 1: here here's an example of how complex this gets, right
Speaker 1: to the point where we would need to have a
Speaker 1: specialist in here to really explain in Layman's terms, what's
Speaker 1: going on there? We go The optical force originating from
Speaker 1: the Galcian intensity profile normal distribution along the z axis
Speaker 1: attracts the particles towards the center and so acts against
Speaker 1: both the pulling or the pushing forces, as it was
Speaker 1: explained in figures to A. B. C. Of the main text. Therefore,
Speaker 1: if the beam is switched on or its polarization has changed,
Speaker 1: the pulling or pushing forces propelled the particles to their
Speaker 1: new equilibrium positions established in the Gaussian beams. To develop
Speaker 1: an appropriate theoretical description of the geometry, we need to
Speaker 1: take into account not only the Gaussian beam intensity profile
Speaker 1: dragging particles to the beam center, but also the influence
Speaker 1: of the scattered field reflected on the mirror back towards
Speaker 1: the particle. This means that they were using a mirror
Speaker 1: to um to help create interference within this Gaussian beam,
Speaker 1: and Gaussian beams, we should say, are our beams that
Speaker 1: are stronger in the center than they are at the
Speaker 1: at the outsides. So again, it's similar to that vessel
Speaker 1: beam approach where they were using two vessel beams in
Speaker 1: order to interfere with one another and create that pressure
Speaker 1: but in this case, you're using a beam to interfere
Speaker 1: with itself, one beam in a mirror. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: other thing that's interesting that uh you you might not
Speaker 1: have caught from that passage you read, but they can
Speaker 1: change how the beam interacts with the particles by messing
Speaker 1: with the polarity. Right, So if you tweak the polarity
Speaker 1: of the beam, you could say push instead of pull. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it gives you a lot of different options for
Speaker 1: manipulating these these uh, microscopic or smaller objects. Now it's
Speaker 1: you know, this lends itself to lots of different applications. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that we're just starting to kind of consider right
Speaker 1: now because we're still in the very much the early
Speaker 1: early stages of developing this technology. But you could hypothetically
Speaker 1: sort um different kinds of particulates out of something that
Speaker 1: you didn't want in there. You could use it to
Speaker 1: sort um diseased cells versus healthy cells, or or bacteria
Speaker 1: versus healthy cells. Right. If the stuff you wanted to
Speaker 1: take out of a solution, whether it was within a
Speaker 1: person or in a you know, some some sort of
Speaker 1: chemical whatever. Um, as long as that stuff was of
Speaker 1: a very specific size, that was different from all the
Speaker 1: stuff you wanted to leave in. This would be a
Speaker 1: great way of doing it because you would know automatically
Speaker 1: that your methodology you was not going to pick up
Speaker 1: anything you didn't want. It was just gonna concentrate on
Speaker 1: the stuff you wanted to remove. Because again, that geometry
Speaker 1: only allows this light to interact with particles of a
Speaker 1: specific size and it ignores everything else as far as
Speaker 1: the pulling is concerned. You know, there's another good tangent
Speaker 1: on what these types of lasers can do in in
Speaker 1: tiny town. Uh, they said the vessel beams, So the
Speaker 1: one from the first study we talked about that. They said,
Speaker 1: those are really cool for what's called optical injection. So
Speaker 1: what is that. That's where you use a laser to
Speaker 1: stab a hole right in a cell and that allows
Speaker 1: things that you're trying to put in the cell to
Speaker 1: flood in. Gotch. So if you wanted to without necessarily
Speaker 1: killing the cell. Right. So, So, if you're doing some
Speaker 1: medical research and you really needed to be able to
Speaker 1: manipulate cells on an individual basis and see what a
Speaker 1: particular type of medication perhaps might do, or if you
Speaker 1: just need to study the cell and you need to
Speaker 1: insert some form of chemical so it will show up
Speaker 1: on whatever imaging technique you're using. Then these could be
Speaker 1: very useful techniques. It's kind of interesting stuff. So so Joe,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk a little bit about scaling this up.
Speaker 1: So we figured out that we can use light to
Speaker 1: pull stuff what we want toward us. What if the
Speaker 1: stuff what we want is really big, Like, let's say
Speaker 1: it's not even that big. Let's say it's a I
Speaker 1: don't know the size of a soccer ball or football
Speaker 1: to our friends in Europe or or yeah, okay, or
Speaker 1: or size like a podcast host or something like that.
Speaker 1: Don't bring me into this. I don't want to get
Speaker 1: burned up by your laser. Yeah. Part of the problem is,
Speaker 1: uh so immediately, of course, when this study came out,
Speaker 1: everybody is like, oh, yes, we've got tractor being. We
Speaker 1: can reel in ships. We can, you know we can.
Speaker 1: We don't have to worry about asteroids that because we
Speaker 1: can just use the tractor beam to reposition it. Who
Speaker 1: needs a tether for spacewalking anymore? Right? You know, you
Speaker 1: go outside for a stroll. That's how the International Space Station.
Speaker 1: You just take a walk. You get lost. Oh and
Speaker 1: you're back home, and it makes that noise too, even
Speaker 1: in the reaches of space. No. Part of the problem
Speaker 1: is that, um, these beams require a lot of energy,
Speaker 1: and if you were to scale them up so that
Speaker 1: they were powerful enough to move heavier objects, they'd be
Speaker 1: delivering more and more energy as you did that, which,
Speaker 1: of course, when it strikes the object would turn into heat.
Speaker 1: So you're essentially developing a thermal weapon as opposed to
Speaker 1: a tractor beam. Yeah, it'd be like, well, it would
Speaker 1: be more like a blaster if we want to stick
Speaker 1: with Star Wars or a phaser. If we're talking story, Hey,
Speaker 1: how about like a like a death Star planet killer
Speaker 1: weapon and something like that. Instead of moving the asteroid,
Speaker 1: you've just delivered a huge amount of thermal energy. Snow,
Speaker 1: it's a really hot rock that's heading to our Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe they were really just trying to move Alderan somewhere.
Speaker 1: Maybe they didn't want to destroy it. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: got off. Tarkin was pretty clear on his intentions, and
Speaker 1: I don't even note see based on the scientists that
Speaker 1: I read, I don't even know if it's technically possible
Speaker 1: to pull things that at a huge scale, but I
Speaker 1: know that this this heating up objection exists, so you
Speaker 1: definitely destroy it in the process of pulling it, even
Speaker 1: if you could pull it. So if you were if
Speaker 1: you were a space station trying to pull a shuttle
Speaker 1: into dock, then you would suddenly have this molten slag
Speaker 1: coming towards your space station as opposed to you know,
Speaker 1: that would be the best case scenario, right So anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that that's why even with this amazing breakthrough, and
Speaker 1: we don't mean to to diminish it at all. It
Speaker 1: is phenomenal and really exciting stuff. It's it does not
Speaker 1: mean that we are going to arrive at some sort
Speaker 1: of science fiction future where we are going to have
Speaker 1: these tractor beams in regular use, either here on Earth
Speaker 1: or in space on the map acro scale. One thing
Speaker 1: that I think it's really interesting is it's come up
Speaker 1: multiple times now in this podcast. Is the place where
Speaker 1: they're really thinking that tractor beam is going to be
Speaker 1: useful is the small scale over and over inner space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I wouldn't have even imagined that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's super awesome and interesting. It's just not the way
Speaker 1: that science fiction authors had envisioned it when they were first.
Speaker 1: And really, you know a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 1: science fiction authors create tend to be like placeholders, this
Speaker 1: idea of there's this one problem that you would face
Speaker 1: if you were out in space. How do we get
Speaker 1: around that? What? What kind of what kind of technology
Speaker 1: can we invent? So everything from artificial gravity to inertial
Speaker 1: dampeners to warp drive things that help you get around
Speaker 1: what would otherwise be huge problems When you get into
Speaker 1: science fiction e. Space exploration type situations, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you have to invent these these somewhat magical devices that
Speaker 1: would counteract fundamental issues that you would run into otherwise.
Speaker 1: Tractor beams are just one example of that. But there's
Speaker 1: those fundamental physics are it's you know, still existent on
Speaker 1: the small scale and are what we are much more
Speaker 1: capable of of working with here on Earth. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and there's no there's no reason to say that
Speaker 1: tractor beams themselves will always be impossible on a macro scale.
Speaker 1: They just won't be using lasers necessarily. We might be
Speaker 1: using something else. But before we you know, dive into that,
Speaker 1: I think we should say that for a completely separate discussion,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about the science fiction of tractor beams,
Speaker 1: how they've been used, and also some potential you know,
Speaker 1: science fiction e kind of ways We might be able
Speaker 1: to attain that in the future, assuming that the math
Speaker 1: proves true and that some theoretical or rather hypothetical particles
Speaker 1: actually exist. But that's that's something we'll say for the
Speaker 1: next time. So guys, if you have any suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes of Forward Thinking, please get in touch with us.
Speaker 1: Let's know what you think. Tell us what you think
Speaker 1: about the podcast, tell us what you want us to
Speaker 1: to cover it in the future, tell us what has
Speaker 1: you excited. You can get in touch with us via
Speaker 1: email our addresses f W Thinking at Discovery dot com
Speaker 1: or go to fw thinking dot com. That's where we've
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Speaker 1: be part of the family. We are excited to hear
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