Glowing Up: Princess Pipp Petals explains the physics of luminous gemstones and scintillator particle detectors · 9:38pm Nov 27th, 2021
Hello Pippsqueaks. It’s your favourite princess here. I’m taking over Pineta’s blog this week.
This time I won’t be talking about my new songs or hot news from the palace. You can find that on my usual channel. Today I’m going to talk about the sparkling science of luminescence.
Aren’t those glowing rocks from Bridlewood absolutely stunning? How do they create that amazing light? They really lit up when magic returned to Equestria. Did you know some gemstones can shine without magic if there is something to give them energy? They can fluoresce and glow in amazing colours when lit with ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet is invisible to pony eyes, but these crystals turn a small amount of the energy in the UV light to heat, and emit the rest as colours we can see.
It is so worth a trip to a good natural history museum where you can see amazing crystals glow in the dark. When we go, Zipp spends forever looking at the pegasaurus skeletons, but I much prefer the gemstone and mineral displays. Isn’t this sample of aragonite gorgeous? I just love those colours.
Only a few minerals fluoresce like this under ultra-violet light. But there are some that will light up when hit by other types of energy like x-rays or particles. Crystal scintillators make brilliant particle detectors.
The Crystal Calorimeter in the CMS experiment at CERN has over 75,000 crystals of lead tungstate. That’s 100 tonnes of crystals. When a fast electron flies through a crystal it makes a shower of sparkles, which are picked up by photodetectors. Measuring this light tells us the particle energy.
The CRESST experiment at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy is searching for the interaction of dark matter particles with an array of crystal scintillators cooled to a super cold temperature. When a particle hits a crystal, it produces a flash of scintillation light, and a tiny rise in temperature, which can be measured.
Sometimes crystals can store energy for a long time. They can phosphoresce with a soft glow long after being exposed to UV light. When you heat some crystals, they release the trapped energy from the radiation absorbed over hundreds of years. The method of thermoluminescence dating lets us find out the age of bits of pottery by measuring the glow from tiny crystals of quartz when they are heated in a laboratory.
Isn’t it amazing to think of the secrets hidden in crystals? I wonder what more we can learn from the crystals in Bridlewood. Maybe they could tell us something about the history of magic in Equestria.
Got to go now. Love you lots. Pipp-Pipp-hooray!
Pity modified doped laser fibre amplifiers cant be used to combine the detector, amplifier, signal generator and communications actions into a single DC or even simple optical pumped object?
For this moment in time though, an amazing piece of work and effort on all, with spectacular results. Too much or two little heat measured? new particles and science? The correct measured, more values for the statistical verification?
I'm clever enough to recognize the opportunity for a reference to our favorite Spaniard, but not clever enough to capitalize on it.
"We got the light..."
Love your blogs, Pineta. As usual, they're entertaining and fascinating in their presentation of applied and theoretical Science. And in this case, all of that plus Cute, besides.
As much as Pipp appears to be a little vacuous in the movie, she is actually cute over all, and she does have redeeming qualities. In this case, she's actually latched on to Science, because this subject has qualities she can relate to—things that shine brightly and beautifully in just the right kind of light.
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You do get scintillating fibres. Using fibres to collect the light from large crystals can be done. It's not nearly as efficient as having your light detector up close to your crystal, but is sometimes necessary. One trick is to use a wavelength shifting fibre to match the brightest colour of your scintillator to the maximum sensitivity of your light sensor.
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There's a challenge... I've not read enough of his stories, but does their brilliance come from a regular structure, prismatic quality, and variety of colour?
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My feeling is that Pipp is smarter than she lets on. After all, when her show was turned upside down, she did somehow manage to spot what was going on, extricate herself from a highly strung position, dodge her fans, reporters, and guards, retrieve the crystal, and find her sister with remarkable speed.
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Anyone who mains Ice-Climbers in Smash is not to be underestimated.
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Aragon is terefying because he's basically me if I not only had my shit together, but ultra together.
You can read this projected onto a tree!
EDIT for context: I was testing how strong my projector is last night and happened to have this blog up at the time
5611784 I did notice that she had done all of that with remarkable speed. (Given that, I like to think that she petulantly kicked the can you hear just before her reappearance.) Anyway, I just watched through the movie again, and she's very socially and artistically smart and aware. But after she finds the troupe, she has little else to say in the movie, which is a little disappointing. In any case, I prefer your interpretation.
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She's a social media influencer, so I think it's implied that her public persona is just a performance she puts on for the fans. Which I find fascinating because it makes me think of how modern monarchies work in real life, with royals who are thoroughly educated in PR basically above all else. MLP:ANG, Jacobins?
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I don't read much of Aragon, not because I don't like it but because he's so good at this that it makes me angry.
Seems like Zipp isn't the only physics-proficient pegasus princess pony!
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Pipp seems to be ahead of most modern monarchs, who have very carefully curated social media accounts. She takes the style of successful influencers who build up huge numbers of followers due to their perceived unscripted authenticity... and then lose them with feelings of bitter betrayal when they are shown to be faking it.
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My headcanon is all princesses are physics-proficient. I bet Queen Haven studied relativistic quantum mechanics in her youth.
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Themes? In my MLP? It's more likely than you think.
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Wait, so Izzy is prepetually seeing and translating wide ranging, low quantity high energy particle collision data in real time?!
"Your sparkle is a-maaaz-ing!"
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I repeat, Aragon is so good at this it makes me angry. Okay dammit I'm overcoming my envy and following him.
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Same with Skywriter, Horizon, Cold in Gardez, and a few others.