Refraction of Sunlight in the Bathroom, March 2018
How many topics in physics are contained in a simple rainbow produced on the wall (and toilet) by sun shining through a plastic privacy screen?
Well...the light from the sun is composed of many different wavelengths...the distribution of which is dependent on the temperature of the star - which ours is centered on the the yellow. When the the light encounters an optically dense medium (glass or plastic in this case), the light is absorbed by the molecules and passed from molecule to molecule, the probability of which an absorption and emission occurs is described by Feynman's QED. The principle of least action (from D'Alembert and Lagrangian mechanics) finds the maximum probability amplitude, and hence the interaction that occurs, or the direction the light is refracted. The path of light through the medium is dependent on the wavelength and frequency of the light. One can back up to PAM Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics, ingeniously melded Schrodinger's wave equation and/or Heisenberg's Matrix mechanics with Einstein's relativity, which determined that the only certainty in the universe is the speed of light. Everything else including Newton's fixed stars and time...TIME itself are mutable to make the speed of light constant in every situation. Dirac faced with the actual energy of a particle being the square root of the rest mass and its motion, devised a Hamiltonian that required matricies, later interpreted by Pauli as spin states of particles. Schoedinger and Heisenberg following Bohr's amazing leap of quantized orbits to describe Plancks description of light as quanta....actually they were named by Einstein to describe the photoelectric effect....but Planck needed the quantized description of light to explain the ultraviolet disaster of Rayleigh. Planck was working for the electric company to maximize the light output of municipal utilities at the least cost.... TBC
Refraction of Sunlight in the Bathroom, March 2018
How many topics in physics are contained in a simple rainbow produced on the wall (and toilet) by sun shining through a plastic privacy screen?
Well...the light from the sun is composed of many different wavelengths...the distribution of which is dependent on the temperature of the star - which ours is centered on the the yellow. When the the light encounters an optically dense medium (glass or plastic in this case), the light is absorbed by the molecules and passed from molecule to molecule, the probability of which an absorption and emission occurs is described by Feynman's QED. The principle of least action (from D'Alembert and Lagrangian mechanics) finds the maximum probability amplitude, and hence the interaction that occurs, or the direction the light is refracted. The path of light through the medium is dependent on the wavelength and frequency of the light. One can back up to PAM Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics, ingeniously melded Schrodinger's wave equation and/or Heisenberg's Matrix mechanics with Einstein's relativity, which determined that the only certainty in the universe is the speed of light. Everything else including Newton's fixed stars and time...TIME itself are mutable to make the speed of light constant in every situation. Dirac faced with the actual energy of a particle being the square root of the rest mass and its motion, devised a Hamiltonian that required matricies, later interpreted by Pauli as spin states of particles. Schoedinger and Heisenberg following Bohr's amazing leap of quantized orbits to describe Plancks description of light as quanta....actually they were named by Einstein to describe the photoelectric effect....but Planck needed the quantized description of light to explain the ultraviolet disaster of Rayleigh. Planck was working for the electric company to maximize the light output of municipal utilities at the least cost.... TBC