Light

[Kai Vanuffelen]

Yesterday I was doing a speech at Toast Masters on conservation-glass to an audience of fifteen people, none of them being quantum physicists.
I did mention that the harmful uv radiation gets transformed into infrared radiation. If the uv radiation gets transformed into say green light, that we can see, the picture we look at behind the glass will probably look greenish. That is why the manufacturers transformed it into IR which we cannot see.

Fading depends upon the paint or pigments in the paint that the artist used. Ballpoint-ink will fade fast, whereas charcoal takes an enormously long time to fade. The substrate also matters. Newspaper turns yellow quickly.

I also touched upon radiation. My understanding of radiation is, that they are photons traveling at a constant speed. Not quite sure where the photons are in an atom, whether they are in the core with the neutrons and protons or further among the electrons.

The sun emits all types of radiation from short wave x-rays to long wave radio-waves. Some stars emit more of one type than another depending upon their composition and age. Apparently uv light can be altered into longer IR waves.
Gamma rays go right thru objects, whereas visible light shining onto an apple get bounced back.

Light can be bent as happens when one star moves in front of another star, so that we can still see the star behind the one in front. Light can be pulled back or held back from a black hole and probably light/ radiation/ photons emitted by one star can be trapped by a black hole so eventually as more black holes are formed, all light gets pulled into these black holes together with all other objects. This creates one giant black hole that at some stage bursts apart in a big bang, starting the whole process again.

I mentioned that the layer used by manufacturers either on one side of the glass or between sheets is made up of secret crystals.

Is there anything wrong with what I mentioned above, so that if I do a similar speech in the future I can adjust.

When seeing a picture of these intriguing black holes, they have spout at either pole. Are they releasing antimatter? This is something I did not touch upon in my speech, but maybe one of us knows.

 

[David Lantrip MCPF GCF]

Re: light

Holy cow, that's a whole lot of stuff there, covering art materials, the stability of chemical bonds, quantum physics and cosmology. All of what you said looks more or less correct. Some notes:

Inks, which are essentially dyes, will fade fairly quickly. They depend on chemical bonds which are not as strong as in pigments, which are more chemically stable. Carbon, for instance, is incredibly stable and that's probably a very good reason that it's the basis for life along with its willingness to bond with other elements so strongly.

Light is very weird stuff. It acts like both a particle (photon) and a wave. So in some cases the particle model describes it well while in other instances waves describe it better. But essentially light is composed of photons travelling at a constant speed of 186,000 miles/second in a vacuum. That number is known as C. It slows down in a medium, whether it's air, water or glass.

Its speed, wavelength and frequency are all connected. The speed (C) is equal to frequency (measured in Hertz) times its wavelength. So if you know any two of those you can find the third.

The sun, other stars or any other radiant body will emit electromagnetic energy in a variety of wavelengths, and its peak production is determined by its temperature as described in the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Let's suppose you have a ball of iron slowly heating up. As it reaches, say 200 degrees, it will radiate a lot of infrared radiation, in other words heat, but still only be visible by outside sources of light reflecting off of it. As it gets hotter it will start to glow a dull red. It's now starting to radiate red light, with its corresponding shorter wavelengths, but the majority will still be IR.

It gets hotter still and glows orange. Now the majority of its radiation is in the red light range with some yellow while still emitting IR. Now crank the heat way up and eventually it will go beyond glowing red hot and past white hot to the point where it is emitting X-rays. So your point about stars is essentially correct, but it's mostly about temperature. A star's temperature is at least partially dependent on its age and type and whether it's fusing hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon and so on.

A body of sufficient mass, like a star or black hole, can bend light. This effect of gravity on light was proposed in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and confirmed during a solar eclipse in 1919. He also predicted that with very large massive objects a more distant object behind it could appear twice or more; this was confirmed first in 1979 and then later many times by the Hubble telescope.

I don't think black holes will be the cause of any eventual demise of the universe. That would depend more on an eventual slowing, stopping and reversal of the expansion of the universe known as the Big Crunch. Whether that will happen and the universe ends with a bang or if it will continue to expand until the universe winds down to complete entropy and dies with a whimper is unknown. A lot of that may be determined when we finally get a better grip on dark matter and dark energy, and I think it's going to be a long time before that happens.

 

[Kai Vanuffelen]

Very good David. We all know a bit more now.
Light is essentially photons, that probably have no mass/ weight. Looking at the waves, ulltrviolet light has higher waves or shorter wavelengths, so theses photons are bouncing up and down more than when they are in the infra red.

Since both are traveling at the same constant speed, is it fair to assume, that IR light reaches its destination sooner than the photon in the uv light?

Or, since the uv light has more energy, its photons travel faster than the IR which has less energy, but because it has more of a rollercoaster ride, IR and uv photons reach their destination in the same amount of time.

Is it true to say, that light in the x-ray range passes thru objects more easily than the visible light, where it gets bounced off more easily? Is this because of the higher speed of their photons, or is this because of the angle of penetration?

In visible light, with less steep waves, the photons more or less crash head on into an object, but with x-ray light the photons hit/ penetrate an object at a steep angle.

 

[David Lantrip MCPF GCF]

Nope, all electromagnetic energy, from radio waves to infrared to visible light to ultraviolet to X-rays to cosmic rays all travel at the speed of light, C.