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Light is an amazing substance. It can be used in so many more ways than just brightening a room. Over the years, mankind has discovered ways of using it never before imagined. It can cut steel, be used for communication across entire continents, and everything in between. I am going to briefly illuminate some aspects and uses of light, without the calculus-level formulas. |
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Light is more than just light. It is actually trillions of speeding photons. A photon is something like an atom, but without the things spinning around it. You see because they bounce off of the object that you are looking at and into your eye. Have you ever just lain in the sun to warm up? You get warm because all of those photons are hitting you and creating friction. |
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You already know that light comes in many colors; well, did you know that white light is actually all the colors of the rainbow mixed into one? If you painted a top in many thin stripes of red, yellow, orange, green, blue, indigo, and violet, and spun it fast, it would seem grayish white. Now, as you spin it faster, faster, faster, it would seem whiter, whiter, and even whiter until completely white. One way you can easily show this is with a triangular prism like the one in the picture. It separates the white ray into red, yellow, orange, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This is also shown with rainbows. The sunlight passes through mist, and the many water droplets act as prisms. |
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Did you know that light has weight? It’s true! That is why black holes are black holes- they suck the light down into them, so there is no way to see them. Actually, they can be seen; there are special x-ray cameras that can take pictures of black holes. X-rays don’t have a weight. Sometimes, large stars can actually act as magnifying lenses in this fashion, bending, but not trapping the light. This can allow us to see behind something as big as, say, the sun. |
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