Light is amazing ~ some factoids
Light is amazing.
It is a wave and a particle at the same time.
Light (and in fact the entire visible and invisible electromagnet spectrum) travels at the same speed through a vacuum; 186,000 miles/second.
Light is effectively invisible until it reflects off of something and into our eyes. We don’t see light waves flashing across our paths, we only see what is reflected into our eyes.
Short wavelength visible light is blue and has a higher energy so it scatters more in the atmosphere making the sky blue. But as the sun sets near the horizon the blue light is scattered away through the greater amount of atmosphere between the horizon and our eyes, and we only see the redder light.
Things don’t have a colour, they just reflect certain wavelengths of light. Something which appears blue is just reflecting blue light and absorbing all the rest. It’s not actually blue.
Because light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us, the sun actually rises 8 minutes before we see it.
A single photon of light can travel through two parallel slits simultaneously. This is very weird.
Only 1 billionth of the sun’s light reaches earth. But the sun itself consumes nearly 5 million tones of its mass every second to produce it. About 1.3 million earths could fit inside the sun but the biggest stars would fill half of our solar system if they were at the centre. Their light which we see today left them maybe a billion years ago or more.
The eye is an extension of the brain. Once triggered/fired by a light photon, a photoreceptor cell in the human retina chemically refreshes itself in milliseconds and is ready to fire again. The eye doesn’t actually see light it just sends electrical signals to the visual cortex in the brain which does all the figuring out and then presents itself with what we then think is an image.
It is a wave and a particle at the same time.
Light (and in fact the entire visible and invisible electromagnet spectrum) travels at the same speed through a vacuum; 186,000 miles/second.
Light is effectively invisible until it reflects off of something and into our eyes. We don’t see light waves flashing across our paths, we only see what is reflected into our eyes.
Short wavelength visible light is blue and has a higher energy so it scatters more in the atmosphere making the sky blue. But as the sun sets near the horizon the blue light is scattered away through the greater amount of atmosphere between the horizon and our eyes, and we only see the redder light.
Things don’t have a colour, they just reflect certain wavelengths of light. Something which appears blue is just reflecting blue light and absorbing all the rest. It’s not actually blue.
Because light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us, the sun actually rises 8 minutes before we see it.
A single photon of light can travel through two parallel slits simultaneously. This is very weird.
Only 1 billionth of the sun’s light reaches earth. But the sun itself consumes nearly 5 million tones of its mass every second to produce it. About 1.3 million earths could fit inside the sun but the biggest stars would fill half of our solar system if they were at the centre. Their light which we see today left them maybe a billion years ago or more.
The eye is an extension of the brain. Once triggered/fired by a light photon, a photoreceptor cell in the human retina chemically refreshes itself in milliseconds and is ready to fire again. The eye doesn’t actually see light it just sends electrical signals to the visual cortex in the brain which does all the figuring out and then presents itself with what we then think is an image.
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