Title text:
Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We’re putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3238/
Not to split hairs here, but that’s also kind of the same thing.
Like what does “refractive” mean? Does it mean moving slower or bouncing around?
Well the name refers to the relative incident and internal angles because that’s what scientists first measured. The light slows down due to interactions with the electrons (mostly) in the material. It causes them to move which drags the light. You can model this as an interference from the light produced by the resulting electron movement. I don’t see that as bouncing, especially not like the bouncing on the internal surfaces of fiber optics. But obviously it’s not like anything we can tangibly understand, so whatever mental model works for you is cool.
That’s fair. Nearly everything at that scale is up for interpretation. I find that nothing in physics works the way it intuitively seems like it should.