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-------------------- 2537 - LIGHT - stranger than you can imagine?
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- The star Vega is a very bright star in the northeast and it is 25 lightyears away. When you look at this star the light photons that strike your eye left Vega 25 years ago. Light photons are moving through space an at 186,282.4 miles per second. Let’s say 186,000 miles per second. Photons can not exist unless they are traveling this fast. Photons are a bullet of electromagnetic energy that ceases to exist if they stop.
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- When we measure light moving through water it is traveling at 140,000 miles per second. 46,000 miles per second slower. When light travels through a glass window it slows down to 124,000 miles per second. The transmission of light through another medium does slow down.
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- However, the photons themselves really still travel at light speed between atoms in that medium. What appears to be slowing down is the speed of transmission caused by photons striking the atoms of the medium, absorbing the energy of the photon, bouncing an electron to a higher energy level. The electron returns to the lower energy level emitting another photon of exactly the same energy.
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- This ping-pong effect traveling through the medium is what slows down the transmission of light. The light that reaches your eyes through the glass window is not the same photons the left the object.
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- Light travels one foot in one nanosecond, 0.000000001 seconds, 1 billionth of a second, 10^-9 seconds. So, if the object is 20 feet away it is appearing 20 billionths of a second younger than it actually is at the moment you see it.
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- Light always travels at the same speed through space to all observers. To accomplish this space must curve and time must slow. If you were traveling in a spaceship at near the speed of light and you turned on a flashlight, the beam of light would leave the flashlight at 186,000 miles per second from our eyes. To another stationary observer it would not be traveling at near twice that speed.
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- To the stationary observer and to all observers the light gets its constant speed by the distance shrinking and the time slowing to keep the ratio of distance / time a constant 186,000. The velocity of light remains constant regardless of the relative speed of two observers. Another way to put this is the laws of physics remain the same regardless of where you are or how fast you are moving.
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- We do not have spaceships yet that can travel near the speed of light. However, we do have satellites in geosynchronous orbits 12,600 miles up and traveling at 8,700 miles per hour. These are the satellites used in the GPS, Global Positioning System. They use atomic clocks in the satellites and on the ground to measure the time delays between transmission signals.
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- The time delays allow triangulation calculations to locate positions accurately on the ground. The common, inexpensive GPS receiver can give accurate positioning to within 15 meters. Without making calculation adjustments for slower time due to the speed of the satellites and faster time due to the less gravity at their elevation, the accuracy of positioning would be 11,000 meters per day. Getting worse accuracy every day.
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- There is only a tenth of a second delay between the satellites and ground. The satellites experience only 25% of the force of gravity felt on the ground. The gravity that curves space and the atomic clocks that slow must be taken into account.
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- Not everyone believed this when GPS was first brought into operation. The engineers tried to get the accuracies hoped for without the adjustments due to Relativity. Once the system was calibrated they were able to try the operation both ways. When the calculations were adjusted according to the Relativity math they got the correct results. Light has its own reality. We need to understand this and adjust accordingly if we are to understand our realities. Strange but true.
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- Light is what we see, but light in the broadest sense is but a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light is a form of radiation. This radiation only travels at one velocity, the speed of light.
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- Light is an electric wave, or oscillation, and a magnetic wave, or oscillation, traveling forward but at right angles, or 90 degrees, to each other as they oscillate. A single oscillation of both waves is a single wave of light. It is one wavelength. The wave travels forward in a straight line at 186,000 miles per second.
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- However, how fast each oscillation occurs is the frequency of oscillation and that determines the energy of the wave. The frequency is the number of waves occurring per second. The entire spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum is simply oscillations occurring at different frequencies. The lower the frequency the lower the level of energy. Radio waves, for example. The higher the frequency the higher the energy. X-rays, for example.
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- The lowest energy in the spectrum is called radio waves. A radio wave can have a frequency of 1000 waves per second and travel with very low energy. A radio signal requires a great deal of amplification before it can be detected.
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- If you added energy to this wave it would increase in frequency, creating faster oscillations, shorter wavelengths that are called microwaves. The frequency of microwaves is 3,000,000,000 waves per second and the wavelength is 10 centimeters, or 100,000,000 nanometers.
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- An analogy might be adding energy in the form of heat causes atoms to vibrate faster. Temperature is actually a measurement of how fast atoms are vibrating. Air atoms at room temperature are vibrating at about the speed of sound, 700 miles per hour, or 1,000
feet per second. The hydrogen atoms in water are vibrating more slowly. If you heat up the water, adding energy, causing the hydrogen atoms to vibrate faster they become a gas like the air.
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- Add more energy to the microwaves and the frequency of vibration increases and the wave is called infrared radiation. The frequency is 300,000,000 waves per second and the wavelength is 1,000,000 nanometers.
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- Add more energy to infrared waves and the frequency increases becoming visible red light. 400,000,000,000,000 waves per second, (4*10^11 cycles per second). The wavelength of red light is 700 nanometers. This is the size of the cones in the retina of your eye. Your eyes can detect and you can see red light. The smallest wavelength the cones in your retina can detect is 400 nanometers which is visible blue light.
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- Add more energy to visible light and it disappears into the ultraviolet that we cannot see but we can still feel. Ultraviolet turns the pigments in you skin to tan in color, or worse to red and a sunburn.
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- The wavelength of ultraviolet light is 10 nanometers, about the size of a single atom. The frequency of the wave is 10^16, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 waves per second. The frequencies of these high energy oscillations are becoming incomprehensible. The smallness of the wavelengths are atomic in scale, also becoming incomprehensible.
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- Add more energy to visible light and the waves become X-rays that can pass right through the atoms in your tissue and expose the denser atoms in your bones that lie underneath your skin. X-rays have frequencies of 10^19 waves per second and wavelengths of 0.01 nanometers.
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- Add still more energy to X-rays and they become Gamma Rays which are harmful to your body’s cells and can mutate your DNA. The wavelengths are only 0.0001 nanometers, ( 10^-4 nanometers). The frequencies are 10^21 waves per second. The Gamma Rays continue to become smaller and smaller wavelengths until they reach the theoretical limit of 10^-43 meters, ( 10^-34 nanometers).
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- The light in the infrared, the visible, and the ultraviolet is emitted by the electrons in atoms. When electrons fall from a higher energy shell in the atom to a lower energy shell they emit a specific frequency photon that corresponds to the change in energy level. A similar change in energy levels occurs inside the shells in the nucleus of atoms. This is where Gamma Rays are emitted. Gamma Rays are identified by their energy level in electron-volts.
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- Gamma Rays have energy levels of 25,000,000 electron-volts. Compare this to X-rays at 2,500 electron-volts. Ultraviolet light at 2.5 electron-volts and visible light at 0.5 electron-volts. Visible light has just enough energy to trigger the optic nerves in the back of your eye.
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- What happens when you add more energy to Gamma Rays? This high energy light can turn into matter. And, in the reverse process matter can turn into light. The formula for the conversion is Energy = 900,000,000,000,000,000 times the Mass.
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- Joules of Energy = 9*10^16 m^2/sec^2 * mass in kilograms. When 1 million electron-volts is converted into matter its mass is that of one electron. An electron has a mass of 10^-30 kilograms. That times 10^17 meters^2 / seconds^2 = 10^-13 joules. One joule of energy is the same as 10^19 electron-volts. E = m*c^2 = 10^-13 joules / 10^-19 joules / eV. Or, the mass of an electron converts to 1,000,000 electron-volts. That amount of energy equates to a Gamma Ray.
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- The center of our Milky Way Galaxy has strong “light” emissions of 511,000 electron-volts. This unique energy level of 511,000 eV results when an electron and an anti-electron (or, positron) come together and annihilate each other. Their mass disappears into a flash of Gamma Rays. ( Half of the matter annihilated is dissipated in the form of neutrinos).
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- Our Sun emits 2,223,000 electron-volts of Gamma Rays. This is the unique energy level created when deuterium is formed by the union of a neutron and a proton in the high energy of Solar Flares.
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- Astronomers have measured the Gamma Ray emissions of the Crab Nebula at 16,000,000,000,000 electron-volts. Our Galaxy and the surrounding Universe are awash in Gamma Rays. When “light” energy and mass are around so is gravity. Gravity is the curvature of space and the slowing of time.
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- Is “light” energy what is warping space and time? What about Dark Energy that is the repulsive force expanding space in the Universe? Is “light” responsible for this as well? “Light” has a much bigger role to play in the Universe than what we can “see”. All that we do not see is stranger still. We understand what we see and we have more to learn.
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- December 12, 2019 2537 1043 1044
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--------------------- Tuesday, December 17, 2019 --------------------
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