Glass plasma capillary on kitchen countertop
It's amazing what you can buy on Amazon. This photo was originally taken for a challenge on the elements, hence the description that follows. The wine glasses serve to insulate 7500V from the countertop to prevent carbon tracking for which I'd truly be in the dog house.
When a pure element is heated, individual colors are produced. This puzzled many as more commonly when an object was heated it first glowed red, then yellow, then white. However, for a pure element, the colors remained constant regardless of temperature. In 1885, Johann Balmer showed that hydrogen’s colors of violet, blue, aqua and red fit a simple equation with only step-wise integers in its denominator, and this became known as the Balmer Series. It was accurate, but no one understood why.
In 1899, Max Planck postulated that colors exist at quantized energies, E = h/(color wavelength, λ), where h became Planck’s Constant. For this, Planck received the Nobel Prize in 1919.
In 1913, Niels Bohr proposed a model for the hydrogen atom that explained its colors under the assumption that electrons exist in orbitals with only certain allowed radii. We now know that they’re not circular but instead regions of probability – hydrogen’s looks like concentric balls with three fuzzy Q-tips poking out – but the analogy holds. For this, Bohr received the Nobel Prize in 1922.
So, when an electron falls from a higher energy orbital to a lower energy orbital, the difference is given off as light whose color is defined by Planck’s Equation, ΔE = h/λ, ΔE being the difference in energy between orbitals.
This also works in reverse, energy always being conserved, as inputted light causes electrons to jump to a higher energy orbital, the color associated with the change absorbed, and with our eyes or camera we only see the colors that were rejected and not absorbed.
We can thank the element hydrogen for initially perplexing great minds, for our understanding of how and why the world has color as we see it, and for the birth of Quantum Physics.
Canon FD 100mm f/4 macro, taken at f/32
Glass plasma capillary on kitchen countertop
It's amazing what you can buy on Amazon. This photo was originally taken for a challenge on the elements, hence the description that follows. The wine glasses serve to insulate 7500V from the countertop to prevent carbon tracking for which I'd truly be in the dog house.
When a pure element is heated, individual colors are produced. This puzzled many as more commonly when an object was heated it first glowed red, then yellow, then white. However, for a pure element, the colors remained constant regardless of temperature. In 1885, Johann Balmer showed that hydrogen’s colors of violet, blue, aqua and red fit a simple equation with only step-wise integers in its denominator, and this became known as the Balmer Series. It was accurate, but no one understood why.
In 1899, Max Planck postulated that colors exist at quantized energies, E = h/(color wavelength, λ), where h became Planck’s Constant. For this, Planck received the Nobel Prize in 1919.
In 1913, Niels Bohr proposed a model for the hydrogen atom that explained its colors under the assumption that electrons exist in orbitals with only certain allowed radii. We now know that they’re not circular but instead regions of probability – hydrogen’s looks like concentric balls with three fuzzy Q-tips poking out – but the analogy holds. For this, Bohr received the Nobel Prize in 1922.
So, when an electron falls from a higher energy orbital to a lower energy orbital, the difference is given off as light whose color is defined by Planck’s Equation, ΔE = h/λ, ΔE being the difference in energy between orbitals.
This also works in reverse, energy always being conserved, as inputted light causes electrons to jump to a higher energy orbital, the color associated with the change absorbed, and with our eyes or camera we only see the colors that were rejected and not absorbed.
We can thank the element hydrogen for initially perplexing great minds, for our understanding of how and why the world has color as we see it, and for the birth of Quantum Physics.
Canon FD 100mm f/4 macro, taken at f/32