How to See Inside Anything

You might think of x-rays as the go-to particle to see through solid objects. But there's a subatomic particle out there that can see through everything from volcanos to lead shielding in nuclear reactors. It's called a muon, and scientists have been using muography since the 1950s.

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[Jobobn]

Muon Fun-fact: Muon's half life is insanely short--they only have an average lifespan of 2.2 micro-seconds--which means that they *should* decay before ever reaching the surface of the planet, let alone several kilometers beneath the surface. However, due to the time-dilating effects of Einsteinian relativity, and the fact that muons produced from cosmic rays are almost-always traveling at relativistic speeds, they are able to reach Earth's surface before decaying into more stable products.

This is one of the (many) proofs we have that time dilation does occur.

Edit: Grammar fix; this is what I get for quickly typing it out on my phone :P

[clickrick]

Fun fact: At the Royal Greenwich Observatory's site in Cambridge, they used to have a cat they call Muon. Or possibly Mewon. They never quite made it clear.

[MrHamster]

A favorite saying in our lab is, "With enough energy, anything is see-through"

[lordstevenson]

Nice to see this video, I will be starting a new job working with a crystallography group as a software engineer using muon, and neutron diffraction techniques in various experiments.
It’s amazing what this technology can be applied to.

[Bowie_E]

Easy: just place your boat down in a one wide tunnel, drink a night vision potion, and slowly inch yourself through the wall a bit.

[Grateful.For.Everything]

This is really cool, def next level, we’ve figured out how to scan entire cargo ships and see it all by its chemical make up!!! Do y’all understand how wild that is, it’s amazing!

[MACNTOSFAM]

as someone who’s worked in xray for many years, this would be a step up from the basic utilization & mission of using xrays. i wouldn’t mind going back to school to study & be licensed to use muons 😊

[BenjaminIMeszaros]

The ability to see inside anything was inside you all along.

[Rebar_real]

Once I heard muon I couldn't remember the word neutrino for some bong reason. So while looking up SNOLAB in Sudbury for the escaped word I noticed the SENSEI dark matter detector is now online. Wish them luck!!

[JonnyMack]

It's seriously incredible what good stuff us humans are capable of these days! .. that crazy uncle at the BBQ in the 90's talking about cosmic rays flying through space proving time travel wasn't so crazy was he 😂

[misterthedork]

Perhaps this answers the question about how sensors and tricorders work in Star Trek 🤔

[TheMixmastamike]

I hope muon radiography makes its way into wall scanners for construction and the trades

[Moonbagger]

I'm taking notes for my sci-fi writing.

[NipkowDisk]

I would LOVE to have a portable muon scanner for finding old survey monumentation buried by numerous paving projects, etc.!

[NeuralNightmares]

This video was the first thing I saw after reading a research paper on how a team of Ohio researchers managed to use x-rays to 'see' a single atom

[kuunib]

This is interesting I've heard of refraction X-Ray and Neutron imaging, I've even once visited a Synchrotron microscope before, but Mouns. Well I guess if we can use Electrons in microscopes this isn't a far fetch.

[KatieDeGo]

With enough mushrooms, anything is see-through

[ayas]

Please, more videos about elementary particles :)

[JustMeJH]

I wonder if muon detectors could have human applications. They seem to be incredibly detailed.

[obidobi]

I like that the thumbnail is an x-ray image with the text it's not with x-rays