At the moment, daylight pours into the room where I am writing this. The light is pretty much invisible to me. I see very well all the objects, and the walls, and everything else in the room - but not the light itself. If I hold my hand up to the light coming into the room, I can see it strike my hand making it suddenly brighter, and if I leave my hand in the light long enough, I can feel warmth. If I were to shake a dusty cushion, the daylight might strike the dust and therefore I would see the light, but otherwise no, I don't physically see the light until it reaches an object. This light is known as "white light", and it is supposed that it is made up of all the colours of the visible spectrum.
Books tell me that the white light in this room is moving very fast, approaching speeds of 300,000 km/s. It is supposed that white light is refracted by an object. The material absorbs certain frequencies of the visible spectrum, and it reflects others. It is the frequencies which are reflected that we see as the colour of the object. I now struggle with this theory.
I struggle with the theory mainly because we are told that white light has no frequency. Surely white light should have a frequency? Everything in the Universe has a frequency. All electromagnetic radiation, ranging from X-rays to radiowaves has a frequency - except, we are told, white light. White light apparently, is the sum of all the frequencies in the visible spectrum. By combining these frequencies into white light then the light has no frequency. I am not convinced.
Light leaves the Sun and travels to our planet. On its journey it does not fill space with light. The space between the Earth and the Sun remains black. The light that left the Sun is not visible until it hits the Earth. It's as if the atmosphere of the Earth transforms the energy from the Sun into visible light. Right now, in this room, the light from the Sun enters through the window as white light.
All matter emits EMR. Only when something is at absolute zero will it no longer emit EMR. A small fraction of the EMR spectrum is taken up by the visible spectrum, but if you look at the world around us, everything - absolutely everything - is made up of colour (the possible exception being black which is considered to be the absence of colour). Colours are not a property of an object though, they actually belong to the eye.
The pigment in a material will behave in such a way that it somehow activates receptor cells in the eye which the brain then interprets as colour. I don't believe the material absorbs some frequencies of white light and reflects others. I think matter generates EMR due to the electric fluid of the aether.
The aether field has a constant applied pressure, somewhat similar to a hydraulic system. We write this pressure as the speed of light in a vacuum: 300,000 km/s; except it's not really a speed, but rather a volumetric flow rate. This volume is normally measured in cubic metres per second. Should the volumetric flow rate of the aether therefore be written as 300, 000 cubic kilometres per second?
The fluid of the aether is induced to flow through matter. Molecules act as motors which suck in and blow out the fluid of the aether. The aether is manoeuvred through the atomic vortices of matter, generating a difference in pressure between the applied pressure constant of the aether field, and the pressure of the aether inside matter.
In water, the speed of light is said to be about 3/4 the speed of light in a vacuum, around 225,000 km/s. These kids pulled a simple, but also brilliant, experiment to show how the different values for the speed of light can be measured.
http://www.ms.uky.edu/~skim/SpeedOfLight/
As said before, the pressure of the aether field is an applied constant of 300,000 km/s. The aether has been way-laid by being forced to pass through an atomic obstacle course. The fluid of the aether has become choppier. The peaks and troughs of the EM waves move closer together. The speed of light in water has a value of 225, 000 km/s - is this illustrating a pressure drop in the aether field in water?
The speed of light in glass, which has a higher refractive index than water, is supposed to be something in the region of 200, 000 km/s. Once again, do we have a pressure drop?
Refracted light inside a glass prism produces the colours of the rainbow - the visible spectrum - in a process known as dispersion. A ray of white light enters the glass and is bent towards the normal. The colours of the visible spectrum leaving glass are bent away from the normal. It's as if the light enters the prism at an angle, then makes a bee-line for the other side like it's a speedboat on flat water, before being reflected out through the otherside at an angle.
I remember once swimming in the beautiful crystal waters off Corsica, and being struck by just how blue it was. It wasn't grey like the waters I'm used to back home in Brighton - this stuff was really blue. The other thing I noticed was my reflection on the surface of the water - no surprises there - but at the time I was immersed in the water looking up, just below the surface of the water. The surface of the water was acting as a mirror, and this is something known as total internal reflection. Is something inside the prism acting like the surface of water?
We see the colours of the rainbow inside the prism, and then we see them leave the prism. EMR is a wave which propagates in the medium of the aether. Inside the glass prism the fluid of the aether gets choppier. The peaks and troughs come closer together. The frequencies of light get higher. These higher frequencies are what we recognise as the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum thus emerges from the prism and out into the big bad world. The fluid of the aether is maintaining the higher frequencies outside the prism in order to support the visible spectrum. The glass medium of the prism is effectively making waves in the aether field which it then transmits into the air. And one cannot help but make the analogy of a pebble being thrown and making ripples on a pond.
It is often handy to think of light as a wave – like the wave you make by dropping a stone in a pond – because light has many wave-like properties. When you drop a stone in a pond, you create ripples, and you could actually measure the distance between the ripples. This distance is called the wavelength. Each color of light has a unique wavelength.
Christian Huygens, a Dutch physicist fond of optics, was one of the first to suggest visible light is a wave disturbance, like the ripples on a pond or the vibrations of a violin string. Huygens kept at his research and showed that light waves interfere with each other in the same way as waves of water, and in the same way as waves from musical instruments.
Thomas Young devised a light-slit experiment which showed light as a wave disturbance. The crests and troughs from two diffracted rays alternately added together and cancelled each other out. The interference effect is not restricted to light. Waves produced on the surface of a pool or pond will spread in all directions and undergo an identical behavior. Where two waves meet in step, they will add together to make a larger wave by constructive interference. Colliding waves that are out of step will cancel each other via destructive interference and produce a level surface on the water.
In one of Newton's experiments, he cast the spectra of three prisms onto one another so that they overlapped without coinciding. In the centre, where all the colours fell, the combined spectrum was white. Is this an example of destructive interference, where the vibrant frequencies of the visible spectrum cancel each other out?
What of the fluid of the aether as it moves from the vibrant frequencies of the spectra into the lower frequencies of white light? We are told that white light has no frequency, so we should therefore expect to find the fluid of the aether perfectly still. But is that quite the case as I look around my room? The molecules of the air are surely inducing the aether to wobble. Indeed, the speed of light in air is slightly lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. There's a pressure drop in the aether field inside this room compared to the constant applied pressure of the Universe. I suspect white light is really low frequency EMR.
Sunlight is directional. It starts at the Sun, and then it arrives at our planet. My back garden at this moment is half in sunlight, while the other half is shaded by the house. The half that is exposed to the Sun is much brighter. The colours on that side are much more vivid than those of the garden dulled by the shade.
I look at the bright green grass. The grass contains a pigment which my eye detects as green. The grass is somehow creating a pressure drop in the aether field, which generates a frequency of EMR that I see as the colour green. Why is it that the grass always looks greener on the otherside? Why does the grass look so much brighter in the sunlight?
When a photo is taken, the shutter in the camera opens for a fraction of a second to allow light from the scene to enter. The light is focused by the camera lens onto a piece of light sensitive film. The film contains chemicals which break down when exposed to light and thus the image is recorded on the film by the pattern of chemicals, broken down or otherwise. The more the chemicals are broken down, the brighter the resulting photo will be.
http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/graphics/x_posure.htm
Can this process not only be applied to cameras, but also to how we visualize the world around us? Is an object brighter because receptor cells in the eye have a longer exposure to brighter colours? This longer exposure is only possible if light from brighter objects is reaching my eye before the light of dull objects. Is the light from the grass in the sunlight travelling with a greater velocity to reach my eye - or is it that these changes in velocity take place inside the eye - or is it both?
As I write this I feel like I've ended up somewhere very strange. Somewhere unexpected. I've long suspected that white light has no frequency because I imagined it had been mistaken for heat, but maybe there's more to it than that. Is there, quite literally, more than meets the eye?
Many thanks:
Physics demystified By Stan Gibilisco
http://www.hartnell.edu/faculty/pmoth/Files/AST1LAB/Spectroscope.doc.
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/clario2.htm
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/08/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.ars
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/GBSSCI/PHYS/Class/light/u12l2c.html
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