Basically what MIT did is real. Hardlight can be formed and created. But it takes a ridiculous amount of energy. Something forerunners have.

Thank you for making halo as real and believable as possible

It is the electromagnetic force that keeps atoms from fusing due to like charges repelling. The strong force is what holds the atomic nucleus together and enables fusion to occur.

Fun Fact: When Master Chief detonates the Havok Nuke onboard The Mantle's Approach killing most of all the 950 million Prometheans on the ship, Cortana shields him in a bubble of hard light and teleports him away directly after the Havok Nuke is detonated. Protecting him from the destruction and rubble of The Mantle's Approach. However the bubble of hard light only lasts a few moments until Cortana is pulled into slip space and is teleported to the Domain.

I think you explained this very well! I like that the “support beams” are closer to white than blue because… they’re light particles!

I’m so glad that you brought up that MIT has proved the concept is possible

That first hard light bridge we come across in CE still fascinates me till this day. Halo is so awesome

been subbed since 2 years ago, only halo channel I watch anymore. love the content and would love to see a deeper dive into the overall history of the covenant

What i love about this channel is even though i didn't really understand, I got the basics: Forerunners slow light down so they become particles and have mass

I always thought an energy sword made of hard light is not only possible, but badass. I'm curious as to how well it would perform over a plasma-based one: it won't burn you, it will disintegrate you.

Interesting video. There are a few things that I believe should be cleared up, though: *Just because something has mass, doesn't mean it interacts with the strong nuclear force. Such a particle must also exhibit what is called "color charge" in order to interact with gluons (strong force mediators). That limits it only to interactions between quarks and gluons. *The strong force also isn't what prevents fusion of nucleons; if anything, because of its high relative strength over short enough distances, it is one of the forces that enables fusion. The electromagnetic force, on the other hand, is what mitigates fusion between nuclei below energies that force them past the repulsive Coulomb barrier formed by the EM interaction. *The strong force is also largely *not* the field that allows you to interact with other objects, that would be a combination of the Pauli exclusion principle and the electromagnetic interaction. The mutual repulsion of the electrons of your hand and the phone/table/cup, at short distances, is only part of the equation; the main thing that does the job, is the restriction of fermions, like electrons, to a single spin, location, and momentum state. That is part of the reason, in fact, why chemistry works the way it does. Other than that, I like the speculation of the working process here, especially either discovering or even *inventing* a quantum field to couple photons with mass. Putting a bit to the imagination, that would indeed possibly allow visual mimicry of nearly any material, like a kind of visual programmable matter.

Was playing halo infinite yesterday and had to complete a task with hardlight weapons, and it got me wondering about the specifics of hardlight so this video is pretty convenient

I hadn’t thought about being able to filter the wavelength of reflected light to look like natural materials. Very cool. Great video!

Well, I can safely say you answered every question about Hardlight that I've had over the years.

Is there enough lore for you to do a most detailed forerunner armour? I've wondered how it compares to the Mjolnir mark 5 since Sparky mentioned it in the library.

Alternative title: portal light bridges explained.

Wow! Boy was that an intense deep dive into very low-level physics. Well done how you started off at a higher level talking about the nature of the forces of physics and then drilling down into the "unobtainium" level assumed physics of how we think it might be done. Nicely done!

I'm here for the technical, keep it up. It's great!

You were excellent. This is why I love watching your videos. Keep up the good work

Love this content 😊 always look forward to any and all new videos

Your massless videos might not blow my 'head off my shoulders', but they sure blow my socks off! Keep up the good work man! Edit: I think that the light to hardlight change doesn't have to be instant or explosive like you said. Instead of slowing down light, wouldn't it be possible for them to gradually adjust their boson field emitters to make the light 'hard' over the course of a second, or maybe just an appreciable fraction. The way the 'bridges' extend kind of lends credence to this. It just seems like slowing down light would be more work when they can already precisely control their boson fields. Maybe they can make a gradient, maybe they can make it flicker like a refresh rate. As long as they can get atoms and other particles out of the way before they cause an explosion, everything should be fine.. right? Edit2: I now realize you were proposing these as separate mechanisms, not a redundancy 😅

Pretty sure Portal explores this concept as well. Hard light appears as a testing element in a few of Aperture's test chambers.

ahhh yes! this did it for me. This is exactly the type of science and playing around with ideas that I live for! Loved it!

If there ever was a universe other than halo that needs your knowledge and expertise it is warhammer 40k you would have so much content and lore to work with.

Loved it! As always the content is cool!

This video alone has me question further many things about our universe. When you were explaining the intricacies of light and how it works, it had me wonder if the manipulating of light through mass and temperature and such could potentially allow us to look deeper into how gravity and dark matter and energy works. Keep up the amazing work!

Amazing way to explain it. But that means the forerunners and promethians are constantly using a make amount of power for all structures without being affected by am emp. So my question, what is the power source 😜

3:58 I thought I would clarify this; the strong nuclear force holds quarks together inside of subatomic particles, while also allowing certain particles (neutrons and protons) to stick together to form nuclei by virtue of the charge differences caused by quarks. Atoms do not fuse because of the electromagnetic field emitted by the positively charge nucleus as well as the negatively charged electron cloud orbiting the nucleus (the coulomb field). Strong force doesn't keep atoms from fusing, the electromagnetic force does.

Bose-Einstein condensate (a state of matter) has been use to slow the speed of light down to the speed of a bicycle and even to nothing at all. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of effort, something similar to hard light has been made before, but it is possible.

Awesome video!

I consider myself pretty intelligent and a Halo lore nerd but you caught me off guard about hardlight structures. Like you said, we're used to them being transparent bridges or shields but solid "holograms" make a lot of sense especially in the Halo world. The real world science part was brilliant and made me think; "would hardlight be hot or cold?" Given that our current techniques is to use particles at almost absolute zero, it should be cold but light/photons carry a lot of energy that could burn. I guess frostbite burns too, either way I'll be wearing shoes if I ever cross a hardlight bridge

Very nice breakdown, these videos are good for redescovering my passion and curiosity for science in times of university exams

It should be noted that photons don't actually slow down when light travels through a medium. The photon is absorbed by a part of the medium and retransmitted which then is absorbed by the next bit of the medium it's traveling through and so on. The absorbtion/retransmission of the photons is what makes it seem like the speed of light has changed but it really hasn't. Light travels between the bits of the medium at c, it's the interaction with the bits of the medium that can take longer. The photons in the experiment didn't attract each other gravitationally, they became entangled during the passage through the medium because of the interactions they had with the medium. Once they exited the cloud the photons kept on behaving as light always does, they just were traveling in pairs/triplets.

THANK YOU FOR ANSWERING THIS QUESTION THAT BEEN ON MY BRAIN

Well done. Very well done.

That is awesome always wondered about hardlight. Thank you sir

I don’t have any advanced degree or a background in physics but it made sense to me. Another wonderful and enjoyable video. Keep it up!

Something to think about is that the reason why the speed of light changes depending upon what media it is traveling through is because it is interacting with the substance that it's traveling through. It gets a lot stranger because this interacting force is capable of producing a magnetic field of absolutely ludicrous intensity. We are talking about a magnetic field powerful enough that you can push against it and not be able to tell that you are pushing against something that isn't solid or liquid or something else. This typically requires the use of plasma and will absolutely produce a significant amount of additional light. This is a similar way to how a force field from startrek works. You could potentially toon the field to only allow one type of atomic material like say it will only let oxygen through but not hydrogen or anything else or only water but nothing else can get through. You can basically tailor it to only one or a predetermined list of materials you could also use it to heat or cool an object as it comes into contact with the field or passes through in addition to making the transfer from one side to the other one way or free exchange of your selected materials. A good example of this is only allowing oxygen to pass from the left side to the right while only allowing hydrogen to pass from right to the left. You can easily make a more complicated system where the materials from one side are forced into bonding in a certain way somewhere inside the field and then they pass out in another place or reenter one of the previous locations. This is all dealing with plasma dynamics and magnetic fields and very little else. I don't have any way for the mimicking of colors or patterns of colors except for the possibility of using different plasma creation materials and magnetic fields to shape the locations and have certain colors only being displayed in certain areas.

3:25 This video gives new meaning to blew my mind. I feel like my head was blown clean off my shoulders.

Love your content, mate.

You did great. Can you do a video on unsc cryo technology?

The fact that so much of halos tech is actually reasonable science wise and somewhat attainable for humans is frankly incredible.

A lot of this video (especially parts about mass and field interaction that it causes/was caused by) are honestly a little questionable, but I like the part about hardlight projector "printing" the hardlight structure layer by layer, using the previous layer as substrate. makes much more sense than building the entire thing on thin air. (or vacuum)

Lore and theory & most detailed of the ferrarius assembler Vats... Would be epic !!!

Essentially hard consists of exotic parts called polaritons; particles made partially or entirely out of photons. MIT created them by shining short pulses of infrared through rubidium atoms that where put into a rydberg state. A rydberg atom is a pseudo state where the outer most electron orbiting the atom is stuck in an excited orbit. When the photons strike this already excited electron, it takes enough time for the photon to be re-emitted that other photons can be absorbed by the same electron. When these photons are re-emitted, they are emitted as pairs or triplets of photons bond together as if they were quarks in a subatomic particle. The mass and velocity of the new polaritons is proportional to the energy of the initial energy of the photons (E=mc^2). The video mentioned that the rubidium had to be very cold; this is because the rydberg state is very delicate and any heat of vibration could ruin the effect. It also kinda explains why we don't find polaritons in nature, despite them being surprisingly stable as far as exotic partials go. Apologies for the long explanation.

I’m an academic (historian) so as a ley person in anything sciency, I think I understood it well enough. Good content as always

I would like to see a video on your process of research for your videos. Like where and how you find your sources and your process of applying them.

Well, hard light has been experimentally created in the lab already, just with a small number of photons instead of large visible structures.

This came out today?! I was just researching this.

Did you look at how Gundam 00 used light in the series?

7:45 actually light always travels at C, when it’s passing through a medium like water it’s still moving at C. It only appears to move slower bc the photons are no longer moving in a straight line. If you want to know more there’s a Vsauce vid called “Would headlights work at light speed?” that delves into the topic in depth.

Can you please do a video about Mass effect reapers vs halo flood on your 00 multiverse channel please?

i love this

Have you done a most detailed breakdown of humans? Like, human biology. I think it'd be interesting, would love to see how you'd make it. Or ancient human weapons, they were said to shatter enemies like glass.

Good video

When speaking about the requiem bridges, I feel like there's some kind of analogy to 3d printing to be made there, but I only know the basics, my limited knowledge says it's probably in the mystical realm of resin printing

This video plus Reploid REVO's What Exactly Are....Busters?, and What Exactly Are...Gems?, with TREY the Explainer's What are Gems? (Scientific Analysis) video has everything i need to know for Steven Universe's Gems Gemology. If you add Certifiably Ingame video called Hidden Tech of the Holodeck, you can also Simulate how the ships in the show are bigger on in inside than outside. Thanks for the amazing video on hardlight it is one of the few videos on the internet showcasing most of the closest technology/science on the subject. Edit: I said the What Exactly Are...Gems? video was the less useful I was wrong it was the more useful video from Reploid REVO.

Hey! I liked your explanation about quantum physics, but I would like to point out that elementary particles do not "Form" fields, they are the field, to be more clear they are the "quantitative units of energy of the fields themselves" after all everything is basically oscillations in the fields. I imagine that this kind of construction could become possible once we solve the problems with energy, it could happen in the near future when our fusion reactors get more and more efficient.

Hard light is made using the captured light of Alfheim, using a bifrost crystal. At least, that’s what Freya said.

Your technical knowledge goes far above my head, but I find it interesting all the same. I enjoy listening to you explain how the technology of the Halo universe works in terms that the layman of our universe can understand to some extent. How's your functional replica suit of Mark VI powered assault armor coming along? I haven't seen or heard anything on that project for some time.

hey there! i loved this video--it did a great job at breaking down much more complicated topics than i think im capable of learning on my own, and it's helped me clarify the hypothetical operation of hard light in a sci-fi story of my own. i know im about seven months late, but i was hoping maybe there was a chance you (or someone else who has a theory) would see this. one thing i'm still stuck on is... without another medium to meet it or stop it, how would hard light particles be able to be projected into the air and create a 3D structure that has a definitive shape and/or top, without the particles simply escaping into the atmosphere? as you said, photons want to travel at the speed of light. with nothing to cool them back down again, wouldn't any vertically projected stream of cooled photons eventually regain energy as they warm, lose mass, and return to traveling as a photon? if they would--how would one "stop" the photons in midair to maintain a rigid, definitive 3D structure? thanks again, have a good one!

4:08 I was holding an Irish coffee while watching this

Photons do in fact have a detectable mass! The density in "Laser" terms if concentrated enough in a given space can, in theory, create hard-light. I did a thesis in High-School about "splitting" photons.

4:16 never noticed before, but does the chief "pull" the charging handle here despite it being on the opposite side? Or does it have a ambidextrous charging handle?

I think that hardlight could be misleading and the main set of particles creates a resistantive force and the light particles are just used to highlight along the space where the force is flowing. Shields in star wars universe are proposed to be made out of resistant particles or ions which push things away, and reject them acting as a field, the light doesn’t show until the shield is shot at. The hardlight could just be getting outligned, like energy swords, magnetic energy guides its, or from the process of making a particle resistant vibrates the particle in such a way giving it a glow

So if we use a device containing supercooled rubidium as a cloud and lasers we could slow light causing it to chrystalize and build using it? idk if i understand right.

I always thought from my perspective, hard light war more akin to a holographic object in a Holodeck from star trek. Something along those lines at least.

Great video and explanation. I'M LOSING MY MIND WAITING FOR THE NEXT PROJECT MJOLNIR UPDATE. 😂😭 ETA for the next update?

And now im making a pot of coffee at 3pm lol thanks 🤣

The easiest way to make hard light, is to keep light at ridiculously cold temperatures. This slows the photons to such a point that they take form and shape, as their vibration and rotational speeds begin resembling physical matter. That's just my guess. Watching your video now.

Could you cover star roads please?

Hard light buildings for when you don’t just want a power outage to turn off the lights but the entire house itself

8:27 yeah that was good. they emitted the light to display something imageable. it radared back energy that could be detected...

I enjoyed your explanation of hard light. There seems to be a difference between hard light tech in Halo and the hard light tech used in Overwatch? Can you explain that?

If hard light is extremely cold within the confines of its emitters, would it become "hot" again after leaving it?

Could you cover the powers and abilities of cortana in halo 5 guardians- halo infinite?

Thanks. but I wonder if the Slowing-Down effect can be achieved through projecting the Photon-Light as a Penetrating-Ray through [Multi-Layered Woven-Magnetic-Fields], but then again I suppose that would actually require having Technology to Project Magnetic-Fields like a Custom-Soundwave through [combining Resonance with Magnetics], which I suppose is probably above the current tech-level of modern understanding.

From the words of Bugs Bunny from the Wabbit series, "Everyday we live more in Sci-fi."

I have a question about the photons that are emitted from the hard light bridges. Clearly they don’t have mass as they would otherwise be destroying everything in a massive radius, that means that the photons emitted by the hard light constructs must lose their mass somehow. Do you think it’s a process similar to radioactive decay? Where the photonic “molecules” are decaying into regular photons without any mass and giving the bridges their glow. In that case the projector would have to be constantly generating new hard light layers to replace the ones that have fully decayed.

Question: Could a hard light construct have infinitely small vacuum tubes within that allow light-speed transit within them by normal photons, and make much faster circuits?

So how does hardlight disintegrate organic material? Does hardlight structure lack friction?

Err few issues. What let's your hand interact with the table isn't the strong nuclear force but actually still electromagnetism. The strong nuclear force is attractive. We can't think of it like positive negative because it's not. The strong nuclear force acts over short distances, specifically the coulomb barrier. What keeps your hand from pushing through the table is electromagnetism. But more specifically, LIGHT. Photos are the first carrier so any em reaction of any sort is mediated via photons. Each of the forces has their boson. For strong nuclear it's a gluon. For weak its w and z. For light it's the photon! For the Higgs field it's the Higgs boson 😅 and we are now on the question if there is a boson for gravity and or time (graviton and tachyon)

Just wanted to make sure that people know it’s the interaction between electrons in materials that allows traditional materials to be solid, the strong nuclear force can’t reach out past its own atom’s electrons and as such the solidness of normal matter is dictated by the repulsion of negatively charged electrons. The barrier that makes it so hard to get fusion reactors again is made by the electric repulsion of protons from 2 nuclei, the strong force holds a nucleus together. I also don’t think that forcing photons to lose energy translates into a mass gain, E=mc^2 dictates that a loss of energy would also be a loss of mass. For example, most of a proton’s or neutron’s mass comes from the binding energy in gluons holding the quarks together. By taking energy out of the bonds you effectively decrease the overall mass of the system. I do not have a proper education in particle physics, but my best guess for how the light-rubidium gas thing works is messing with the spin of a clump of photons, similar to how a Cooper pair effectively changes 2 electrons’ spin states in a superconductor. Cooling a superconducting material does not directly create the superconducting property, rather it prevents the insane background noise (the heat) from drowning out the exotic interactions that you want to happen It’s probably difficult to explain quantum spin states in layman’s terms, but I think a future attempt might be improved by pointing people in the right direction, such as explaining how electric repulsion and chemical bonds make things solid instead of the strong nuclear force, and adhering strictly to the math you bring up (E=mc^2 in this case, as c is more a measure of the speed of causality and can’t be manipulated, it might accidentally paint an inaccurate picture of physics to a layperson). I do think that you did well in the potential explanation of Forerunner bridges with some minor tweaks, I’d say they take the material around them and rapidly cool them or do something else to prevent the background noise from drowning out the desired quantum interaction. This new hardlight layer could be a good thermal conductor, or work well in propagating the interaction that makes the light gain effective mass. Between 2 hardlight projectors the solid light grows from each projector and meeting in the middle, similar to how water freezing or metal cooling can be controlled by adding nucleation points in specific positions.

Would this be how light sabers work? The "kybher" crystal slows down the light similar to the gas cloud. What's the significance of the gas chosen by MIT for the experiment? Does it have a solid, liquid and/or crystalline form as well?

Was that a whiskey sip or a coffee sip? The world may never know. 🤣🤣🤣

Can you make a video on how plasma weapons may work in reality

So, the energy sword is considered as one?

So essentially by shining light through a electromagneticaly controlled cloud of super chilled metallic gas you can project solidified light structures? Am I understanding this concept correctly?

Is Hardlight more powerful and advance then Particle Beams?

The only thing I cannot grasp here is how E=MC/squared is not violated when decreasing energy results in an increase in mass. If speed increases mass and mass is multiplied by energy then either I'm missing something or a certain German scientist was partially wrong

This light goes hard feel free to screenshot

Great job. Just one simple question. Is it possible that "hard light" is actually a mistranslation?

Dude this is dope! Does this mean that hard light bridges appear blue due to cherenkov radiation?

Sounds like that biforst the Norse dreamed about

If we can manipulate photons to travel slower than the speed of light, then that should be evidence enough to prove that we can make objects we mass travel faster than light safely. The problem is that it revolves around an area of physics and quantum mechanics that haven't discovered, don't understand, or haven't identified yet.

One potential problem with hardlight assuming it could exist in reality, is that light can get vary hot (light bulbs). Would hardlight become more or less hot from being slowed down and combined. or would it not be hot at all. If it would be hot, would it be to hot for a human to withstand.

Could hard light be used in a defensive measure such as a shield

Might not get a portable Hardlight Gun anytime soon or have tech to reverse engineer for my own but gotta start somewhere.

great explamation for something that is fictional but would the process of slowing down photons create an imenmse ammount of heat? from my understanding shooting photons through a denser medium only result in a loss of energy and thus loss of the velocity because of interactions between them and the molecules of the medium resulting in an energy transfer.

Still need to get a energy sword wall lamp