Like ripples in water, light vibrations radiate out from the source, bounce off objects, and travel into your eye.
But light waves are also bouncing in all other directions too, allowing the person next to you to see. Not only that, longer, invisible wavelengths from all radio, TV (and cell phone) channels are also passing in all directions through the same space. Physicist and explainer Richard Feynman explains it all with clarity and enthusiasm.
Direct link to YouTube video
Richard Feynman on Wikipedia
Thanks, Dave!
Thanks for sharing this on your blog!
ReplyDeleteDid you know Feyman was also a half-decent artist (under the pseudonym "Ofey")?
ReplyDeleteThis post is uncannily similar to what I was doing and even helped me a little. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteRichard Feynman is my hero.
ReplyDeleteGeez, Jim, this guy reminds me of dad when he was happy.
ReplyDeleteIf only physics teachers could be like that.
ReplyDeleteGreat post , James. One of the take-aways from this is that Light waves/photon-thingies don’t interfere with each other! This means that yellow light and red light don’t make orange light, they make a cocktail of red-yellow light that our eyes read as orange (optical colormixing). There are no primary colors of light. Also orange light (photons that vibrate at a given wavelength) are not the same as this yellow-red light cocktail (a mixture of photon/waves vibrating at different wave lengths).
ReplyDeleteFeynman was a very good artist. I had the pleasure of seeing his work here in Pasadena at the ’Armory Center for the Arts' a few years back. It was a group exhibition of Richard Feynman, Jirar Zorthian, and Richard Davies. Richard Davis was a long time close friend of both Feynman and Zorthian. He is a retired Physicist, happily living and painting here in Altadena, CA. His paintings are currently on exhibition at ‘The Coffee Galery’ in Pasadena. -RQ
Thanks for the post. I am a big fan of Feynman - thank you also for the link for all those clips!
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