Friday, April 17, 2026

What Happens When Light Goes Boom? Part 3: Brad Bradington Sprints

The Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory — the blue glow is Cherenkov radiation from electrons outracing light in water. Argonne National Laboratory. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We have the crowd. We have the star. Now it's time to put them together. Here's exactly what happens — and why — when a charged particle outruns the local speed of light in a material. Also: why it's always blue.



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