Shedding Some Light on Light

Hello Humans! Have you ever looked up into the night sky at all the stars and wondered how light can travel from place hundreds of thousands of light-years away and still be detected by your eye? Well, for the past few weeks, I definitely have. Light is one of those really weird science topics found in a place known as the “Quantum World.” That’s where scientists categorize all of the weird sub-atomic particles such as Photons, Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons. For the most part, we think of all of these things as particles that behave in very predictable patterns, because that is what we were taught in 7th grade science. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, you were lied to. That’s right, the government lied to you. How did I get to the Government? Well the school is a public government-run program. I’m excited to see what conspiracy theories come out of this blog post. Now, you may be asking yourself, “Why did the government I love so much lie to me?” Well, like a parent lying to their child that sugar is bad for their health, (Really it’s not. Your body actually converts everything into sugar, because that is the molecule it uses to make energy. It just takes your body longer to rearrange and make sugars out of “complex sugars,” than it does out of “simple sugars,” or sugars that are already sugar), the government lied to you to let you accept a simpler truth and continue to live your life. Because if you had been taught that an electron behaves as both a wave and a particle, you would have had to learn not only how to draw the atom, and the electron shells, but also the physics of waves, the different orbitals of atoms, and somehow wrap your head around how a particle could behave as both a particle and a wave. Your 7th grade mind was too small and immature to learn all of that, so they condensed it down to let you learn the basics and move on with your life. Well I’m here to help you learn the truth. So, back to light. Light moves as both a wave and a particle. This may not seem very strange to you, because you might just see a small dot in your head moving up and down in a wave-like pattern. But this is wrong. I won’t go into detail, because when my Chemistry professor did, my brain exploded, and I don’t want to harm your brain, so just know that this is really weird. Because the laws of Physics were known to apply to everything, until the Quantum World was discovered. New laws of Physics were discovered, and are still being discovered today. A photon is the light particle, and at its core is a particle of energy. Your eye “sees” different colors by different wave-lengths of photons being reflected or absorbed. For example, if you see the color Green, such as in Photosynthesis, that means all of the wavelengths are being absorbed by the substance, except for the green wavelengths. White light reflects all wavelengths, and black absorbs all wavelengths. Your eye “sees” these wavelengths by the photon being reflected exciting a molecule in your eye. Cool, huh?

And besides making cool lights in the night sky, we literally wouldn’t be alive if light didn’t exist. This is because Plants, which are at the bottom of the food chain get their energy from light. The cows all you meat-eaters eat are normally fed corn, grass, and hay, all of which derive their nutrients from photons from the sun. I discussed Photosynthesis more in depth in an earlier post.

Now back to the stars that are hundreds of thousands of lightyears away. I find it funny that light travels so fast in such a short amount of time that we have to calculate its source by light years, or the space light travels in a year. The speed of light is 2.998 x 10^8 m/s. Or, for those of you who aren’t fluent in Scientific Notation, short-hand of metric units, or Significant Figures, that’s 299,800,000 meters per second, rounded. That is dang fast. There is something really cool that happens when you approach the speed of light. First of all, light will always travel 2.998 x 10^8 m/s faster than you. Even if you could somehow get your body to go 2.998 x 10^8 m/s and survive the massive amount of force put on your body, Light would still be going 2.998 x 10^8 m/s faster than you. How cool?! But something cool happens as you approach the speed of light. Time goes by slower. So, if I were to go 2.997 x 10^8 m/s, which is getting pretty close to the speed of light, and then slowed back down to the 0 m/s I am currently going by sitting on my couch writing this post, I would be the same age, and you would be much older. Isn’t light so cool? It’s why I’ve made it one of my wonders of science. As a scientist, I’m supposed to look at this objectively, but as all scientists do, I have some theories of how it relates to things like religion, which I will share in a later post. This super cool property of the speed of light makes the song “Time in a Bottle,” seem much easier to obtain. You just travel close to the speed of light, and there you go, you have more time. It’s weird to think that by going faster, time goes by slower. This is one of the reasons car drives and plane flights take FOREVER, because you are traveling closer to the speed of light.

Putting all of this together, and relating it back to the stars, one reason why stars twinkle, is because of the wave-like pattern that Photons follow. They are white because they reflect all light. The photons travel for hundreds of thousands of light-years, but still are able to reach your eye because they are younger than your body lying on the grass looking up at them. So the next time you see light, stop and think about what makes it so cool, and what you would do if you could travel close to the speed of light. Stay wild, flower child.