ABOUT THE POEM: When a nuclear reactor first powers on, it glows with an otherworldly blue light, one of the rarest sights on Earth.When a nuclear reactor first powers on, it glows with an otherworldly blue light, one of the rarest sights on Earth.
That glow is called Cherenkov radiation, a phenomenon that occurs when charged particles travel through water faster than light can move in that same medium. It’s not the light of fire, but of pure energy breaking a physical boundary.
First discovered in 1934 by Russian physicist Pavel Cherenkov, the effect was later explained by Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm, earning all three the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics.
It’s one of science’s most mesmerizing demonstrations of what happens when humans tap into the atomic fabric of the universe.
