TechStuff Classic: TechStuff is Caught in a Tractor Beam

realistic in what ways? Is it realistic versus unrealistic? How might it actually work? And would it be remarkably different from the way it's depicted in science fiction films. I hope you guys enjoy it, So let's sit back and listen to this classic episode tractor Beam, tractor beams. Yes, Yeah, this is This was something that Lauren had suggested because she saw an item in the news, and at the time, I would imagine Lauren had no idea how incredibly complex

a topic this would turn out to be. Ye, As it turns out, particle physics is not simple necessarily, but we're gonna tackle it anyway. We are We are indeed, because you know what, we've watched a lot of star Trek between the two of us. We have faith in ourselves.

So let's let's talk about what a tractor beam is, especially in that realm of science fiction, because I think that's where most people have encountered the original idea, right sure, and especially since tractor beams do not exist as such in three dimensions in the real world yet, not on the macro level anyway, right, not not nothing that you could see with your own two eyeballs. Right. So essentially

it's a intergalactic tow truck kind of thing. Yes, a beam of light that can be used to pull objects towards the source of that light. Yeah, which is that's pretty phenomenal because, as we understand in physics, light does in fact exert a pressure time push stuff. Kepler said that Yep, exactly, yep, yep Kepler. Kepler observed this, and in fact it serves as the basis for uh futuristic

technologies such as sun sales. Similar sales. These would be enormous sales, literally sales that you would extend from a spacecraft and allow sunlight to press against the sale and thus propelled the StarCraft because you're talking about being in an environment where there's no there's no gravity that's affecting you apart from well, I mean, they're gonna have gravity within the Solar System, but you're not working like trying

to escape gravity. At that point. You're actually already out in space, so you're not having to worry as much about things like friction and gravity. So smaller forces, for example, photons can so so to have a kind of light that would be able to trap an object and even pull it in is sort of counterintuitive based upon the knowledge that photons can push stuff away. So we've seen tractor beams used in lots of different science fiction you. Star Trek, of course, is one of the big examples. Yeah.

The first reference was actually in The Skylark of Space, which was a drama by Et Smith, originally serialized in n and published as a novel in nine. Wow, I did not know that. I do know that it's used in Star Trek quite a bit. There are two things that you have to remember about Star Trek tractor beams. They can pull just about anything anywhere, and if you reverse the polarity, you can turn it into a weapon. Well, reversing the polarity, as we all know, is how you

do things in Star Trek. Yeah, I was explaining earlier. It is the have you tried turning it off and on again approach in Star Trek. If if it's something's not working, reverse the polarity and then it works. Uh. And then, of course in Star Wars it was used. The Death Star catches the Millennium Falcon in a tractor beam and a series of tractor beans, a whole connexus of tractor being right, and pulls it back into the Death Star so that the Millenium Falcon cannot make its

daring escape. This, of course allows dar Vader to face off against Obi one Kenobi, and I could go on, but that's not what this episode is about. Also, I suspect that a few of our listeners have seen Star Wars, maybe maybe one or two. Episode four is amazing. If you have not seen it, you need to go check it out. But anyway, yeah, so, so science fiction is one of those things that is a really useful tool

for storytellers. Uh. If they have a story about a ship encountering some sort of wreck or other kind of of body out in space, it needs to be pulled away. And the nice thing is is that we've got scientists here on Earth who are saying, hey, how can we do this science fiction thing for reels right? Knowing how light behaves and uh, and maybe finding new ways to

make light behave in perhaps an unexpected fashion. Well, I suspect that, in fact, Star Trek used some actual research that was going on in the nineteen sixties as a basis for their tractor beam, because according according to the Star Trek universe, the way that their tractor beam works is it's actually WILLI a graviton force beam and I just made little quote marks in the air for the benefit of nobody really, so that was weird. Gravitons are

hypothetical particles that that essentially mediate the force of gravity. Uh. They're hypothetical because we have not observed an actual graviton. We don't know how we would We don't we know that in order for our quantum model of the universe to make sense, we need something like a graviton to exist to explain the force of gravity. There are four fundamental forces in the universe. There's strong, nuclear, weak, nuclear,

electro magnetic, and gravity. Out of those, gravity is the weakest, but it's also the one that we cannot easily incorporate into the quantum model of the physics. Right, It's sort of assumed by Einstein's general theory of relativity that gravitational waves are a thing that exists, that ripples in the spacetime continuum, caused by very large moving objects, particularly, but nobody has detected these. So so really the way we

observe this is through the force of gravity. I mean, that's that's that's we can see the outcome just exactly so. And to explain to you guys how weak gravity is in comparison to the other forces, here's a very simple, uh experiment anyone can do anyone who has access to a comb and a balloon. So let's say you've got, you know, get a balloon. You just inflate the balloon with oxygen. Don't do helium because that will negate the results of this test. Check. So oxygen inflated balloon, you

sat down on a table. Gravity is pulling the balloon downward. I am oversimplifying here, so physicists please don't don't write in and complain. But the balloon is held to the table in part due to friction, but also in part

due to gravity. If you were to take your comb and rub it against say a sweater, and get build up some stack electricity on the comb, and then touch the comb to the balloon and lift, you would see that the stag electricity that was generated while you were rubbing the comb against your your sweater would be enough to attract the balloon and lifted off the table. That means that the any amount of electromatic force, the static

is stronger than the gravity. And the gravity, yeah, You've got an entire planet beneath you that is got this very strong gravitational pull, strong in comparison to other things that we directly observe throughout the day, and yet it is dwarfed by strong enough Yeah, strong enough to pull a bowling ball from the top of tower. Right but right so, and and gravity just so. To complete the

whole picture here, it depends on two things. It depends on really you have to have two different bodies, but it depends on the body's mass and their distance from one another. But they do exert gravity, a gravitational pull against each other. So, for instance, I have a cup of tea in front of me, I am exerting a very tiny gravitational pull on the cup of tea, and it is exerting a very tiny gravitational poll on me.

Now this is dwarfed by the fact that I'm also on the planet Earth and that the Earth is exerting gravitational force on both of you. Right, So I you know, I can't observe this. I don't really, I'm not aware of it in any way. But that's that's yeah. So keeping that in mind, one easy, relatively easy way of having a tractor beam like effect, even though you wouldn't be beaming anything, is to use the gravity of one

object to influence the movement of another object. Now, this is something that we've talked about before on tech stuff, when we were chatting about could an asteroid destroy the Earth if if, if some space agency. I was gonna say NASA because that's the one that I'm most familiar with. But if NASA were too identified that an asteroid twenty years away has the the uh the chance potential to yeah,

that would be a bad thing. Yes, because we all learned in the documentary arm Again, Yes, that wonderful documentary that taught me that Steve bu Simmy is a better singer than Ben affleck Uh, which I had no way of knowing until I saw that anyway that one way of potentially deflecting the asteroid would be to send a spacecraft up so that you move the spacecraft so it's close enough to the asteroid so that they are are pulling one another with a gravitational pull, and then you

use thrusters with the spacecraft to just very slowly push just not really really it's pull. You're yeah, you're pulling the asteroid because as you move the spacecraft away, the gravitational pull makes the asteroid move with it, and all

you have to do is move it. The further out you go from Earth, the less you need to move the asteroids so that it has it misses the Earth right, because you're talking about angles, So a couple of degrees of difference way the way way the heck out in space make enough difference to not kill everything on it, right, it'll miss the planet in hirely, So that's the idea.

So that's kind of like a tractor beam in the sense that you're using an object to tow another object, in this case objects that are in space, but you're not actually shooting a beam of anything. Right. However, Yeah, it's not it's not made of light. It doesn't do that cool visual effect that you have a sound effect, which obviously that would not not anything in space anyway. Sure, but hey, why why should we start criticizing Now that's

a that's a whole different episode. Um. And So, in the nineteen sixties, people were really excited about detecting gravitational waves, and a few people in fact, suggested that we might make a gravity laser. A couple of people, Helper and Laurent, proposed that this could be called a gazer, which I think is a terrific word. Yeah, and I think means something entirely different. These are modern times, I think, Yeah, I think I agree with you. I think at this

point the scientific community would say, can we ya? Um. They proposed that we could vibrate some types of electric crystals and create a whole thing. And but that's it's never really come to fruition because the above re we have never discovered gravitons, We have never measured gravitational waves. Right for us to be able to create an object that would use gravitons to to make a tractor being we first sort of need to prove that gravitons in

fact exist, because again they're hypothetical right now. It's sort of like the Higgs boson, right The Higgs boson was a theoretical particle that physicists said, for our understanding of the universe to make sense, we need this thing to exist to explain why matter has mass, same sort of thing.

In order for our understanding of gravity to make sense, within the within the framework that we have of our knowledge of the universe, knowing that we are by our very nature limited in our understanding, a graviton needs to exist for that model to really make sense. So we're talking about mathematically, yes, these things to exist, but in reality, we just haven't tracked it down yet. So if we ever do, maybe we can make some sort of technology

that can take advantage of that. But until then, until then, maybe no gravitational lasers. Yeah, I personally hope that we do crack that nut, because that would be I mean, it would be an incredibly useful tool, and not just in the context of space exploration. That's the one that we all think about because again in science fiction, that

tends to be where tractor beams come into play. But as it turns out, tractor beams can have a really useful uh well in implementation here on Earth in space on the planet, and I mean moving things is hard, they're heavy, or even if they're or they're really small. And so yeah, we'll talk a bit in a second all about how some scientists are making micro versions of tractor beams here on Earth and what those could be

used for. But first let's take a moment to thank our sponsor for this episode, and now back to the show. All right, so we've talked about using gravity to create a tractor beam like effect, or possibly even using gravitons, assuming we ever understand them. But that's not the only way scientists are looking into creating a tractor beam like device. There's actually been quite a bit of news over the last decade about scientists using various ways of manipulating light

to pull an object as opposed to push it away. Right, Starting way back in six people started playing with what's called optical tweezers, which are lasers that are capable of manipulating molecules and moving them with precision. And now this is not pulling a particle towards the light source, so it's not technically a tractor beam, right, but it is. It is a method of manipulating microscopic particles very precisely.

So if you're thinking about a plane like an X and Y axis, you could move particles within the X and y axis, but you're not moving them along the Z axis. That would be you know, from the source of light to wherever the particle is. So in relation to the source of light, the particle would not get closer further away, but you could trap it and move it within that X Y plane. That's that's my understanding. Yeah, yeah, and these are well I I that's my understanding as well.

These these laser beams that are being used for this have a Gaussian intensity profiles, which means that they're brighter in the center than they are at the edges. Right. A Gaussian distribution is a normal distribution, and it can be for anything from lasers to really you can even see this in social sciences where you do a survey and you have a Bell curve that shows a normal

distribution that's essentially a Gaussian distribution. So, Okay, light has momentum, right, right, and so when it hits an object, the object bends the light which changes its momentum, and thus the object is pushed back equally and oppositely by the light. Okay, I see, so the lights momentum has changed. The object's momentum is also changed correct according to the conservation of momentum, which you can see in normal, non microscopic classic physics. Right.

And so the Gaussian beam is important because if the sample gets off center in the beam, the weaker light at the edges is bending around the object and pushing it out, but the stronger lighted center is bending around it and pushing it back in, and the stronger force wins. I see. Okay, Yeah, that makes way more sense than everything else I read, because everything I read was a lot of this. This research that we did for this Pathicunar podcast is in is from scientific journals and uh.

And this is a good point for us to make. Lauren and I we're advocates of science education. Absolutely, we both love science. That being said, neither of us are scientists, and we certainly are not particle physicists. And so when you get onto the quantum level, there's a certain level of understanding that we are able to achieve. And beyond that,

this stuff is it is like magic to us. So we're going to explain things as best we can, but please understand there are subtleties to this that we cannot easily explain because we haven't dedicated our lives to understanding them exact and by so if we get anything wrong, please do right us in Um, we love getting that kind of feedback, right, Yeah, No, we definitely want to to communicate the correct information as best we can. But uh,

you know this, this is exciting stuff. So in this case, what Laurence talking about is using light to to uh to isolate and then manipulate microscopic particles. But at this point the stage what we're talking about does not include pulling those particles towards the light source. However, we have discovered, or rather I should say we predibly smart people have discovered ways of using light to act pull things towards the source in a bunch of different ways. Actually, um,

there's one of those is called an optical vortex. Um sounds kind of kind of freaky people. The main research that I've read from this was from Australian National University around so pretty recently, and the the idea of this one is that they use a hollow laser beam to trap light absorbing particles, and um, they get trapped in the center of this laser beam because the heated air molecules around them are pushing in on them goutches, so

they cannot they can't escape the laser beam. They're stuck in that little hollow center, in the hollow center in the in the the doughnut shaped laguer Gaussian laser beam. Yes, that right there, that thing exactly that you just said. Yeah, I have the note. I'm so glad that you did more research on this because when I read that, my eyes kind of glazed over. Yeah. Apparently they were able to move particles about one and a half meters in

the air. Yeah, it's it's really exciting. By they found out that by using too concentric hollow lasers, they can adjust the brightness of the two of them there by heating and cooling the air around the molecules and and then therefore have the molecules move up and down as they will through this hollow tube of light. Wow. So so you're using two different lasers in order to make that maintain this kind of movement. That makes sense, I

understand now. Yeah, I was wondering how that worked beforehand. But yeah, that that totally makes sense. And yeah, and these are nanofoam particles that they were using to the got transported over a meter and and all of this is on the scale again of a very microscopic things. Right. That's something that's important and we'll talk a little bit more about that when we finish with all the different laser methods. But yeah, the methods we're talking about are

very exciting. Don't get us wrong. They are incredibly exciting, particularly in certain very specific implementations like in the medical field. Oh yeah, this is all going to be extremely exciting for for example, removing bacteria from samples, sorting cells, municially manipulating DNA strands is something the optical tweezers have been used extensively for, right, so that there there are real

uses for this. But these are not the same technologies that will let us move spacecraft like toe spacecraft away. And we'll talk about why that is when we get a little further in, because there are a couple of other laser methods that we need to talk about, right right, Um, back back on the kind of sale, the sort of solar sale theme that we were discussing earlier. Optical lift is another version of of light that can be used

to do stuff. It's it's actually just a really simple analog of aerodynamic lift, which of course is when um you create uh uh, how is it? It's higher pressure underwing than over awing and therefore letting a plane lift off the ground in the game. Before we get any further physicists, that's also an oversimplification, and we acknowledge that, yes, there's more than geology, there's more than just that when

it comes to get an airplane off the ground. Also, we know all about the other forward momentum and everything else, but but that that is the concept of lift. Thank you, And so to get slightly fewer angry emails, it's only because Chris and I received all those emails already, but but deservedly so right, oh no, absolutely, yes we love negative feedback. But so I nearly spit tea all over

my laptop. Please don't take that as a as a Please don't take Lawrence Lauren's statement as a means to send us the most negative feedback ever, because my feelings do get hurt, and I apparent you just made a complete liar out of me. That you almost snorfing your tea completely made me crack up. Sorry about that, excellent,

But anyway back to optical lift. It's uh. The scientists have discovered that that you can take an object with a differently shaped top and bottom surface and it will experience a lift force when please standing uniform stream of light that's fast. This is all blowing my mind because before we did this research, I never knew about these different properties of light and and it just it really

stresses to me one amazing universe. This is, you know, to to know that things behave on such a different level than my previous understanding, and also illustrates quite effectively how ignorant I am. But I love to learn, so that's okay. Yeah we get we get paid to learn this stuff and pass it on to you, which is basically the most exciting thing. Um. One of the other categories that I ran across were optical conveyors, which are

really fun. Those are those are the ones that are using Bessel beams, and I think I think Jonathan has a whole section about this one. Yeah, not a whole section, but I can at least tell you what a Bessel beam is. Because when I encountered that term, I thought, huh, what, what exactly do they mean by Bessel beam. It's a specific type of radiation, and that sort of radiation can be a laser, it can be electroma, metic, it can

be acoustic, it could be gravitational. It doesn't really matter what the type of radiation is, it's the form it takes. And that form is a radiation where the amplitude is described by a Bessel function of the first kind. Does that mean essentially, it means that as this radiation moves forward, it does not diffract in any way. It doesn't diffuse, it does not spread out. In other words, it remains concentrated. So what we think of that like a laser beam.

When you shine a laser beam, it doesn't spread out like a flashlight does. But this is a very specific format of that. And in fact, because actually those those laser beams that were that you point at something are Gaussian laser beams. That's we discussed there, and so this is different is different. This is different. It is it is focused, It does not diffract in any way, it

does not spread out at all. And in fact, one a a a feature of a true bessel beam would be that if you were to just interrupt part of vessel beam. Let's let's imagine that the vessel beam is as big around as a pencil, Okay, just for the purposes of illustration, and then imagine that you had, uh use a sheet of paper and cut a little slit in that pencil, and you make the sheet of paper interrupt the vessel beam. Right, So you've got the sheet

of paper that's interrupting half the vessel beam. The other half is going beyond the edge of the paper. A true vessel beam will heal itself beyond the point of interruption. So if I were to interrupt that beam further down the beam, it would become whole again. So it would be the same diameter as it was um at the before a point where you had that interruption. So that's an awesome thing about a vessel beam. Now here's the here's the caveat. A true vessel beam would require essentially

unlimited power. Uh. So Dr Doom would want to make one, uh, certainly, but none of us would be capable of doing it. It's a true vessel beam is effectively impossible for us to make. We can make things that approach vessel beams and that UH emulate many of its features, but a true one is beyond our capability. That is the short and sweet definition of vessel beam. And do keep in mind we're not just talking lasers. Like I said, it

could even be acoustic. So you could create a vessel beam of acoustic energy and make a noise that could be heard perfectly at the destination, no matter how far away it was. That that is fascinating, pretty awesome, that's terrific. It's Jonathan from again here to once again break up the episodes that we can take a quick break. So

researchers are using these. Specifically, some people at New York University, building on research by a Chinese team at the a Star Data Storage Institute, I believe in around two thousand eleven, two twelve people have been working on using a lens to bend and overlap two of these vessel beams um thereby creating what I can crudely, crudely describe as kind of a Strobe effect that will, Okay, it'll hit the front of a particle, and because of that, because it

can reform around an object, it will reform behind the particle. With enough energy that it actually pushes the particle back towards the light source. All right, so what's happening is the photon is is hitting the particle in such a way as to give it a little kick back toward the actual source of the photons correct, which is kind

of crazy. It's awesome. Like there was one point where I was reading one of these descriptions and I was thinking, the only way I could describe this is if you were thinking about having a smaller particles being pushed forward, because larger particles are sinking down, so instead of being pushed down, they're actually going up. And then the more I read about the more I'm like, this is a complete misunderstanding of this, and I cannot go with this analogy.

And that's what I thought. I hope Lauren has got discovered, and luckily she did. Yes. I like the physics, but physics were always the interesting part to me. I was always terrible at algebra, but really good at geometry. I love classical physics. Quantum physics makes my head hurt. I just that's the fun headache. I like the I like the quantum physics headache. If better you than me, what's that terrific quote. Off. If you're not kind of upset

by quantum physics, you haven't understood it properly. I think all of us haven't understood it properly. I think the people who haven't understood it probably the most have the biggest headaches. Those are quantum physicists anyway. But then I say that as as I you know, every quantum physicist interview I've said I've watched tends to include a question that's all similar to, but do you really understand what

it is you're talking about? And the quantum physicist almost always says, you know, there's a certain level where I don't like. There's certain things that you just say, all right, this is how it is, because that's how it is. But to be able to answer, I can't. And so it's, you know, one of those things you just have to accept. And my brain starts to melt out of your ears. Yeah, there's a lot of screaming and waving of fists inside

the craneyde the brain. Yeah. But so the special beaming optical conveyor technology might be an interesting practical use for it could be to test the tensile strength of cells. For example, if if a cell has been infected with malaria. It's more rigid than a normal blood cell, and so it could be super useful in tiny microscopic medical purposes.

Similar to another breakthrough that was very recent as of the recording of this podcast, we're recording this in early February, and there were some publications that we're talking about an experiment that had been performed by scientists from Scotland and the Czech Republic about using a beam of light with

a specific geometry to pull particles of polystyrene. And these particles are very very small, in fact, beyond microscopic, we're talking about nanometers for fos, about four hundred ten nanometers specifically. Think most of the particles we've been talking about have been on on that scale. Yeah, pretty pretty tiny stuff, but fomes and one thousand nanometer particles essentially think about tiny spheres of polystyrene that are only a few hundred

nimeters in diameter. That's essentially what we're talking about here. And they found that by uh polarizing the light in a particular way, they can manipulate these particles, and in fact, not only could they manipulate the particles, but depending upon the way they polarized the light, they could selectively manipulate particles of a certain size while not affecting particles of another size. Yeah, there's a there's a little video of this, by the way, in a press release. We'll link it

somewhere on our on our tech staff media. Yeah, yeah,

you'll have to take a look at this. It's pretty amazing because you think about that, that means that you will be able to selectively uh, grip, sort and move right particles, so that way you could you could keep some undisturbed while you're the ones you're interested in, those are the ones you can manipulate and uh and that is a huge breakthrough you're talking about just by by again changing the nature of the light itself, being able to affect very specific sizes of particles and it doesn't

really matter what the particle is made out of. They were using polystyrene in a liquid solution. So again, this was another breakthrough was that this was something that could work within a liquid, making it very useful for medical purposes. So if you wanted to take a blood cell and you needed to move certain particles in that blood cell out or off to a side so that you could either examine them more closely, or perhaps get them out of the way so you can examine something else in

the blood cell more closely. It would be a very useful tool. One description that I saw of this said that, and and this one in particular. There are a lot of very intelligent people have said very ierdite things about all of the rest of these forms of tractor beam manipulation, and I read them and have said them back to you. This one is so new that not that many people who are smarter than us have really said that many things about it, and so therefore my understanding is tenuous.

But one explanation that I saw said that they used a mirror to bounce the laser beam back across itself, interfering with the head on photons and thereby pushing right. And the the interesting thing to me was that it was through that interference that creates this pulling. It was not, however, because you hear mirror and you think, oh, well, all they're doing is shooting the photons, bouncing it off the mirror, and then the photons hit the particle and then push

the particle. But that's not what's happened. That's not what's happening. It's the it's the interaction of the the oncoming beam and the reflected beam that create this pulling motion. And that to me is phenomenal because at first I thought, oh, well, what they're really doing is just yeah, they're just they're just pushing, they're not pulling. But that's not the case.

That actually is pulling actually the light source they're The really fascinating thing about this is that apparently, under certain conditions, the objects held by the beam rearranged themselves into a structure that made the pull stronger. That's pretty awesome. I mean this, this is so mind blowing to me that this, this world on the nanoscale is every time I read

anything about it, it amazes me. It's like, you know, the two areas I find the most interesting when it comes to exploration are outer space and nanospace because there are a lot of parallels, I mean weird parallels between outer space and nanospace fractals. Fractals say that that's a that is a known quantity. That just make me think of the Jonathan Coulton song Mandel brought Set, which is awesome. Have you heard that? I do not believe I had.

I guess what we're doing. After the podcast is over, you get to hear a song. Alright, trip, so uh we we We alluded to the fact that this is stuff that works on a microscopic scale and would not translate to macroscopic Yes, and here's the reason why. Yeah, the reason why is that all of all of this work with lasers. Lasers, of course, um can burn stuff. And if you had a big enough laser to move you know, the one of the physicists I think mentioned

a football. I assume that they were meaning a soccer ball because they were from Scotland, and that was Thomas Sissmar. There you go, um, and it would fry a long time before you would move that soccer ball. Yeah. In other words, the laser would have to be of such an intensity and size as to destroy whatever it was

you were trying to move. So it might move, but only because someone didn't want it to burn down everything else, Right, it would be moved by some one else who's saying, why do you have this flaming soccer ball in the

middle of the field. Yeah, that's the that's a problem, obviously, I mean, it's it's a it's a non trivial problem and I mean, I know it's a non trivial problem and it sounds like I'm being silly, but no, it's non trivial, and that as far as we are able to determine, there's no way to get around that using this particular implementation of the tractor beam idea. So this would strictly be on the nano and micro scale and

never get beyond that. That does not mean that we won't find some other way of creating a tractor beam. We very well made, but it's not going to be using these particular methods because obviously we would end up destroying whatever it was we were trying to manipulate. So we hope, we hope that we will see some of that in the future. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. If you have suggestions for

future episodes, send me an email. The addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle it both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget. You can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. There you're going to find an archive of every episode we've ever recorded. It's entirely searchable, so you can check and see if I've covered your favorite tech topic, and if not, well get in touch

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