Written by cnathael@blog.com
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Ilmu
Light is
electromagnetic radiation, particularly radiation of a
wavelength that is
visible to the
human eye (about 400–700
nm, or perhaps 380–750 nm
[1]). In
physics, the term
light sometimes refers to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, whether visible or not.
[2][3]
Four primary properties of light are:
Light, which exists in tiny "packets" called
photons, exhibits properties of both
waves and
particles. This property is referred to as the
wave–particle duality. The study of light, known as
optics, is an important research area in modern
physics.
Speed of light
Main article:
Speed of lightThe speed of light in a
vacuum is presently defined to be exactly 299,792,458
m/s (approximately 186,282 miles per second). This definition of the speed of light means that the
metre is now defined in terms of the speed of light. Light always travels at a constant speed, even between particles of a substance through which it is shining. Photons excite the adjoining particles that in turn transfer the energy to the neighbor. This may appear to slow the beam down through its trajectory in realtime. The time lost between entry and exit accounts to the displacement of energy through the substance between each particle that is excited.
Different physicists have attempted to measure the speed of light throughout history.
Galileo attempted to measure the speed of light in the seventeenth century. An early experiment to measure the speed of light was conducted by
Ole Rømer, a Danish physicist, in 1676. Using a telescope, Ole observed the motions of
Jupiter and one of its
moons,
Io. Noting discrepancies in the apparent period of Io's orbit, Rømer calculated that light takes about 22 minutes to traverse the diameter of
Earth's orbit.
[4] Unfortunately, its size was not known at that time. If Ole had known the diameter of the Earth's orbit, he would have calculated a speed of 227,000,000 m/s.
Another, more accurate, measurement of the speed of light was performed in Europe by
Hippolyte Fizeau in 1849. Fizeau directed a beam of light at a mirror several kilometers away. A rotating cog wheel was placed in the path of the light beam as it traveled from the source, to the mirror and then returned to its origin. Fizeau found that at a certain rate of rotation, the beam would pass through one gap in the wheel on the way out and the next gap on the way back. Knowing the distance to the mirror, the number of teeth on the wheel, and the rate of rotation, Fizeau was able to calculate the speed of light as 313,000,000 m/s.
Léon Foucault used an experiment which used rotating mirrors to obtain a value of 298,000,000 m/s in 1862.
Albert A. Michelson conducted experiments on the speed of light from 1877 until his death in 1931. He refined Foucault's methods in 1926 using improved rotating
mirrors to measure the
time it took light to make a round trip from
Mt. Wilson to
Mt. San Antonio in
California. The precise measurements yielded a speed of 299,796,000 m/s.
Two independent teams of physicists were able to bring light to a complete standstill by passing it through a
Bose-Einstein Condensate of the element rubidium, one led by Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., and the other by Dr. Ronald L. Walsworth and Dr. Mikhail D. Lukin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge.
[citation needed]
Electromagnetic spectrum
Generally, EM radiation (the designation 'radiation' excludes static electric and magnetic and
near fields) is classified by wavelength into
radio,
microwave,
infrared, the
visible region we perceive as light,
ultraviolet,
X-rays and
gamma rays.
The behavior of EM radiation depends on its wavelength. Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths, and lower frequencies have longer wavelengths. When EM radiation interacts with single atoms and molecules, its behavior depends on the amount of energy per quantum it carries.
Refraction
Main article: Refraction
Refraction is the bending of light rays when passing from one transparent material to another. It is described by
Snell's Law:
where
θ1 is the angle between the ray and the
normal in the first medium,
θ2 is the angle between the ray and the
normal in the second medium, and n
1 and n
2 are the
indices of refraction,
n = 1 in a
vacuum and
n > 1 in a
transparent substance.
When a beam of light crosses the boundary between a vacuum and another medium, or between two different media, the wavelength of the light changes, but the frequency remains constant. If the beam of light is not
orthogonal (or rather
normal) to the boundary, the change in wavelength results in a change in the direction of the beam. This change of direction is known as
refraction.
The refractive quality of
lenses is frequently used to manipulate light in order to change the apparent size of images.
Magnifying glasses,
spectacles,
contact lenses,
microscopes and
refracting telescopes are all examples of this manipulation.
Light refraction is the main basis of measurement for
gloss. Gloss is measured using a
glossmeter.
Optics
The study of light and the interaction of light and
matter is termed
optics. The observation and study of
optical phenomena such as
rainbows and the
aurora borealis offer many clues as to the nature of light as well as much enjoyment.
Light sources
There are
many sources of light. The most common light sources are thermal: a body at a given
temperature emits a characteristic spectrum of
black-body radiation. Examples include
sunlight (the radiation emitted by the
chromosphere of the
Sun at around 6,000
K peaks in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum when plotted in wavelength units
[1] and roughly 40% of sunlight is visible),
incandescent light bulbs (which emit only around 10% of their energy as visible light and the remainder as infrared), and glowing solid particles in
flames. The peak of the blackbody spectrum is in the infrared for relatively cool objects like human beings. As the temperature increases, the peak shifts to shorter wavelengths, producing first a red glow, then a white one, and finally a blue color as the peak moves out of the visible part of the spectrum and into the ultraviolet. These colors can be seen when metal is
heated to "red hot" or "white hot". Blue
thermal emission is not often seen. The commonly seen blue colour in a
gas flame or a
welder's torch is in fact due to molecular emission, notably by CH radicals (emitting a wavelength band around 425 nm).
Atoms emit and absorb light at characteristic energies. This produces "
emission lines" in the spectrum of each atom.
Emission can be
spontaneous, as in
light-emitting diodes,
gas discharge lamps (such as
neon lamps and
neon signs,
mercury-vapor lamps, etc.), and flames (light from the hot gas itself—so, for example,
sodium in a gas flame emits characteristic yellow light). Emission can also be
stimulated, as in a
laser or a microwave
maser.
Deceleration of a free charged particle, such as an
electron, can produce visible radiation:
cyclotron radiation,
synchrotron radiation, and
bremsstrahlung radiation are all examples of this. Particles moving through a medium faster than the speed of light in that medium can produce visible
Cherenkov radiation.
Certain chemicals produce visible radiation by
chemoluminescence. In living things, this process is called
bioluminescence. For example,
fireflies produce light by this means, and boats moving through water can disturb plankton which produce a glowing wake.
Certain substances produce light when they are illuminated by more energetic radiation, a process known as
fluorescence. Some substances emit light slowly after excitation by more energetic radiation. This is known as
phosphorescence.
Phosphorescent materials can also be excited by bombarding them with subatomic particles.
Cathodoluminescence is one example of this. This mechanism is used in
cathode ray tube television sets and
computer monitors.
Certain other mechanisms can produce light:
When the concept of light is intended to include very-high-energy photons (gamma rays), additional generation mechanisms include:
Units and measures
Light is measured with two main alternative sets of units:
radiometry consists of measurements of light power at all wavelengths, while
photometry measures light with wavelength weighted with respect to a standardized model of human brightness perception. Photometry is useful, for example, to quantify
illumination intended for human use. The SI units for both systems are summarized in the following tables.
SI radiometry units
Quantity | Symbol | SI unit | Abbr. | Notes |
Radiant energy | Q | joule | J | energy |
Radiant flux | Φ | watt | W | radiant energy per unit time, also called radiant power |
Radiant intensity | I | watt per steradian | W·sr−1 | power per unit solid angle |
Radiance | L | watt per steradian per square metre | W·sr−1·m−2 | power per unit solid angle per unit projected source area.
called intensity in some other fields of study.
|
Irradiance | E, I | watt per square metre | W·m−2 | power incident on a surface.
sometimes confusingly called "intensity".
|
Radiant exitance /
Radiant emittance | M | watt per square metre | W·m−2 | power emitted from a surface. |
Radiosity | J or Jλ | watt per square metre | W·m−2 | emitted plus reflected power leaving a surface |
Spectral radiance | Lλ
or
Lν | watt per steradian per metre3
or
watt per steradian per square
metre per hertz
| W·sr−1·m−3
or
W·sr−1·m−2·Hz−1
| commonly measured in W·sr−1·m−2·nm−1
|
Spectral irradiance | Eλ
or
Eν | watt per metre3
or
watt per square metre per hertz | W·m−3
or
W·m−2·Hz−1 | commonly measured in W·m−2·nm−1
|
The photometry units are different from most systems of physical units in that they take into account how the human eye responds to light. The
cone cells in the human eye are of three types which respond differently across the visible spectrum, and the cumulative response peaks at a wavelength of around 555 nm. Therefore, two sources of light which produce the same intensity (W/m
2) of visible light do not necessarily appear equally bright. The photometry units are designed to take this into account, and therefore are a better representation of how "bright" a light appears to be than raw intensity. They relate to raw
power by a quantity called
luminous efficacy, and are used for purposes like determining how to best achieve sufficient illumination for various tasks in indoor and outdoor settings. The illumination measured by a
photocell sensor does not necessarily correspond to what is perceived by the human eye, and without filters which may be costly, photocells and
CCDs tend to respond to some
infrared,
ultraviolet or both.
Historical theories about light, in chronological order
Hindu theories
In
ancient India, the
Hindu schools of
Samkhya and
Vaisheshika, from around the
6th–5th century BC, developed theories on light. According to the Samkhya school, light is one of the five fundamental "subtle" elements (
tanmatra) out of which emerge the gross elements. The
atomicity of these elements is not specifically mentioned and it appears that they were actually taken to be continuous.
On the other hand, the Vaisheshika school gives an
atomic theory of the physical world on the non-atomic ground of
ether, space and time. (See
Indian atomism.) The basic atoms are those of earth (
prthivı), water (
pani), fire (
agni), and air (
vayu), that should not be confused with the ordinary meaning of these terms. These atoms are taken to form binary molecules that combine further to form larger molecules. Motion is defined in terms of the movement of the physical atoms and it appears that it is taken to be non-instantaneous. Light rays are taken to be a stream of high velocity of
tejas (fire) atoms. The particles of light can exhibit different characteristics depending on the speed and the arrangements of the
tejas atoms. Around the first century BC, the
Vishnu Purana refers to
sunlight as the "the seven rays of the sun".
Later in 499,
Aryabhata, who proposed a
heliocentric solar system of
gravitation in his
Aryabhatiya, wrote that the planets and the
Moon do not have their own light but reflect the light of the
Sun.
The Indian
Buddhists, such as
Dignāga in the 5th century and
Dharmakirti in the 7th century, developed a type of
atomism that is a philosophy about reality being composed of atomic entities that are momentary flashes of light or energy. They viewed light as being an atomic entity equivalent to energy, similar to the modern concept of
photons, though they also viewed all matter as being composed of these light/energy particles.
It is written in the
Rigveda that light consists of three primary colors. "Mixing the three colours, ye have produced all the objects of sight!"
[5]
Greek and Hellenistic theories
In the fifth century BC,
Empedocles postulated that everything was composed of
four elements; fire, air, earth and water. He believed that
Aphrodite made the human eye out of the four elements and that she lit the fire in the eye which shone out from the eye making sight possible. If this were true, then one could see during the night just as well as during the day, so Empedocles postulated an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays from a source such as the sun.
In about 300 BC,
Euclid wrote
Optica, in which he studied the properties of light. Euclid postulated that light travelled in straight lines and he described the laws of reflection and studied them mathematically. He questioned that sight is the result of a beam from the eye, for he asks how one sees the stars immediately, if one closes one's eyes, then opens them at night. Of course if the beam from the eye travels infinitely fast this is not a problem.
In 55 BC,
Lucretius, a Roman who carried on the ideas of earlier Greek
atomists, wrote:
"
The light & heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted by the shove." –
On the nature of the Universe
Despite being similar to later particle theories, Lucretius's views were not generally accepted and light was still theorized as emanating from the eye.
Ptolemy (c. 2nd century) wrote about the
refraction of light in his book
Optics, and developed a theory of vision whereby objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes.
[6]
Optical theory
The
Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040), known as
Alhacen or
Alhazen in the West, developed a broad theory of
vision based on
geometry and
anatomy in his 1021
Book of Optics. Al-Haytham postulated that every point on an illuminated surface radiates light rays in all directions, but that only one ray from each point can be seen: the ray that strikes the eye perpendicularly. The other rays strike at different angles and are not seen. He described the
pinhole camera and invented the
camera obscura, which produces an inverted image, using it as an example to support his argument.
[7] This contradicted Ptolemy's theory of vision that objects are seen by rays of light emanating from the eyes. Alhacen held light rays to be streams of minute
energy particles[8][not in citation given] that travelled at a
finite speed.
[9][10][11] He improved
Ptolemy's theory of the refraction of light, and went on to discover the laws of refraction.
He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colors. His major work
Kitab al-Manazir (
Book of Optics) was translated into
Latin in the
Middle Ages, as well his book dealing with the colors of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena like shadows, eclipses, the rainbow. He also attempted to explain
binocular vision, and gave an explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon, known as the
moon illusion. Because of his extensive experimental research on optics, Ibn al-Haytham is considered the "father of modern
optics".
[12]
Ibn al-Haytham also correctly argued that we see objects because the sun's rays of light, which he believed to be streams of tiny energy particles
[8] travelling in straight lines, are reflected from objects into our eyes.
[9] He understood that light must travel at a large but finite velocity,
[9][10][11] and that refraction is caused by the velocity being different in different substances.
[9] He also studied spherical and parabolic mirrors, and understood how refraction by a lens will allow images to be focused and magnification to take place. He understood mathematically why a spherical mirror produces aberration.
Avicenna (980–1037) agreed that the speed of light is finite, as he "observed that if the perception of light is due to the emission of some sort of particles by a luminous source, the speed of light must be finite."
[13] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) also agreed that light has a finite speed, and he was the first to discover that the speed of light is much faster than the
speed of sound.
[14] In the late 13th and early 14th centuries,
Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236–1311) and his student
Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī (1260–1320) continued the work of Ibn al-Haytham, and they were the first to give the correct explanations for the
rainbow phenomenon.
[14][not in citation given]
Physical optics
René Descartes (1596–1650) held that light was a mechanical property of the luminous body, rejecting the "forms" of Ibn al-Haytham and Whitelo as well as the "species" of Bacon, Grosseteste, and Kepler.
[15] In 1637 he published a theory of the
refraction of light that assumed, incorrectly, that light travelled faster in a denser medium than in a less dense medium. Descartes arrived at this conclusion by analogy with the behaviour of
sound waves.
[citation needed] Although Descartes was incorrect about the relative speeds, he was correct in assuming that light behaved like a wave and in concluding that refraction could be explained by the speed of light in different media.
Descartes is not he first to use the mechanical analogies but because he clearly asserts that light is only a mechanical property of the luminous body and the transmitting medium, Descartes' theory of light is regarded as start of modern
physical optics.
[16]
Particle theory
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, 965–1040) proposed a particle theory of light in his
Book of Optics (1021). He held light rays to be streams of minute
energy particles[8] that travel in straight lines at a
finite speed.
[9][10][11] He states in his optics that "the smallest parts of light," as he calls them, "retain only properties that can be treated by geometry and verified by experiment; they lack all sensible qualities except energy."
[8] Avicenna (980–1037) also proposed that "the perception of light is due to the emission of some sort of particles by a luminous source".
[13]
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), an atomist, proposed a particle theory of light which was published posthumously in the 1660s.
Isaac Newton studied Gassendi's work at an early age, and preferred his view to Descartes' theory of the
plenum. He stated in his
Hypothesis of Light of 1675 that light was composed of corpuscles (particles of matter) which were emitted in all directions from a source. One of Newton's arguments against the wave nature of light was that waves were known to bend around obstacles, while light travelled only in straight lines. He did, however, explain the phenomenon of the
diffraction of light (which had been observed by
Francesco Grimaldi) by allowing that a light particle could create a localised wave in the
aether.
Newton's theory could be used to predict the
reflection of light, but could only explain
refraction by incorrectly assuming that light accelerated upon entering a denser
medium because the
gravitational pull was greater. Newton published the final version of his theory in his
Opticks of 1704. His reputation helped the
particle theory of light to hold sway during the 18th century. The particle theory of light led
Laplace to argue that a body could be so massive that light could not escape from it. In other words it would become what is now called a black hole. Laplace withdrew his suggestion when the wave theory of light was firmly established. A translation of his essay appears in
The large scale structure of space-time, by
Stephen Hawking and
George F. R. Ellis.
Wave theory
In the 1660s,
Robert Hooke published a
wave theory of light.
Christiaan Huygens worked out his own wave theory of light in 1678, and published it in his
Treatise on light in 1690. He proposed that light was emitted in all directions as a series of waves in a medium called the
Luminiferous ether. As waves are not affected by gravity, it was assumed that they slowed down upon entering a denser medium.
Thomas Young's sketch of the two-slit experiment showing the
diffraction of light. Young's experiments supported the theory that light consists of waves.
The wave theory predicted that light waves could interfere with each other like
sound waves (as noted around 1800 by
Thomas Young), and that light could be
polarized, if it were a
transverse wave. Young showed by means of a
diffraction experiment that light behaved as waves. He also proposed that different
colors were caused by different
wavelengths of light, and explained color vision in terms of three-colored receptors in the eye.
Another supporter of the wave theory was
Leonhard Euler. He argued in
Nova theoria lucis et colorum (1746) that
diffraction could more easily be explained by a wave theory.
Later,
Augustin-Jean Fresnel independently worked out his own wave theory of light, and presented it to the
Académie des Sciences in 1817.
Simeon Denis Poisson added to Fresnel's mathematical work to produce a convincing argument in favour of the wave theory, helping to overturn Newton's corpuscular theory. By the year 1821, Fresnel was able to show via mathematical methods that polarization could be explained only by the wave theory of light and only if light was entirely transverse, with no longitudinal vibration whatsoever.
The weakness of the wave theory was that light waves, like sound waves, would need a medium for transmission. A hypothetical substance called the
luminiferous aether was proposed, but its existence was cast into strong doubt in the late nineteenth century by the
Michelson-Morley experiment.
Newton's corpuscular theory implied that light would travel faster in a denser medium, while the wave theory of Huygens and others implied the opposite. At that time, the
speed of light could not be measured accurately enough to decide which theory was correct. The first to make a sufficiently accurate measurement was
Léon Foucault, in 1850.
[17] His result supported the wave theory, and the classical particle theory was finally abandoned.
Electromagnetic theory
In 1845,
Michael Faraday discovered that the plane of polarization of linearly polarized light is rotated when the light rays travel along the
magnetic field direction in the presence of a transparent
dielectric, an effect now known as
Faraday rotation.
[18] This was the first evidence that light was related to
electromagnetism. In 1846 he speculated that light might be some form of disturbance propagating along magnetic field lines.
[19] Faraday proposed in 1847 that light was a high-frequency electromagnetic vibration, which could propagate even in the absence of a medium such as the ether.
Faraday's work inspired
James Clerk Maxwell to study electromagnetic radiation and light. Maxwell discovered that self-propagating electromagnetic waves would travel through space at a constant speed, which happened to be equal to the previously measured speed of light. From this, Maxwell concluded that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation: he first stated this result in 1862 in
On Physical Lines of Force. In 1873, he published
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which contained a full mathematical description of the behaviour of electric and magnetic fields, still known as
Maxwell's equations. Soon after,
Heinrich Hertz confirmed Maxwell's theory experimentally by generating and detecting
radio waves in the laboratory, and demonstrating that these waves behaved exactly like visible light, exhibiting properties such as reflection, refraction, diffraction, and interference. Maxwell's theory and Hertz's experiments led directly to the development of modern radio, radar, television, electromagnetic imaging, and wireless communications.
The special theory of relativity
The wave theory was wildly successful in explaining nearly all optical and electromagnetic phenomena, and was a great triumph of nineteenth century physics. By the late nineteenth century, however, a handful of experimental anomalies remained that could not be explained by or were in direct conflict with the wave theory. One of these anomalies involved a controversy over the speed of light. The constant speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations and confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment contradicted the mechanical laws of motion that had been unchallenged since the time of
Galileo, which stated that all speeds were relative to the speed of the observer. In 1905,
Albert Einstein resolved this paradox by revising the Galilean model of space and time to account for the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein formulated his ideas in his
special theory of relativity, which advanced humankind's understanding of
space and
time. Einstein also demonstrated a previously unknown fundamental
equivalence between
energy and
mass with his famous equation
where
E is energy,
m is, depending on the context, the
rest mass or the
relativistic mass, and
c is the
speed of light in a vacuum.
Particle theory revisited
Another experimental anomaly was the
photoelectric effect, by which light striking a metal surface ejected electrons from the surface, causing an
electric current to flow across an applied
voltage. Experimental measurements demonstrated that the energy of individual ejected electrons was proportional to the
frequency, rather than the
intensity, of the light. Furthermore, below a certain minimum frequency, which depended on the particular metal, no current would flow regardless of the intensity. These observations appeared to contradict the wave theory, and for years physicists tried in vain to find an explanation. In 1905, Einstein solved this puzzle as well, this time by resurrecting the particle theory of light to explain the observed effect. Because of the preponderance of evidence in favor of the wave theory, however, Einstein's ideas were met initially by great skepticism among established physicists. But eventually Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect would triumph, and it ultimately formed the basis for
wave–particle duality and much of
quantum mechanics.
Quantum theory
A third anomaly that arose in the late 19th century involved a contradiction between the wave theory of light and measurements of the electromagnetic spectrum emitted by thermal radiators, or so-called
black bodies. Physicists struggled with this problem, which later became known as the
ultraviolet catastrophe, unsuccessfully for many years. In 1900,
Max Planck developed a new theory of
black-body radiation that explained the observed spectrum correctly. Planck's theory was based on the idea that black bodies emit light (and other electromagnetic radiation) only as discrete bundles or packets of
energy. These packets were called
quanta, and the particle of light was given the name
photon, to correspond with other particles being described around this time, such as the
electron and
proton. A photon has an energy,
E, proportional to its frequency,
f, by
where
h is
Planck's constant,
λ is the wavelength and
c is the
speed of light. Likewise, the momentum
p of a photon is also proportional to its frequency and inversely proportional to its wavelength:
As it originally stood, this theory did not explain the simultaneous wave- and particle-like natures of light, though Planck would later work on theories that did. In 1918, Planck received the
Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the founding of quantum theory.
Wave–particle duality
The modern theory that explains the nature of light includes the notion of
wave–particle duality, described by
Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, based on his study of the
photoelectric effect and Planck's results. Einstein asserted that the energy of a photon is proportional to its
frequency. More generally, the theory states that everything has both a particle nature and a wave nature, and various experiments can be done to bring out one or the other. The particle nature is more easily discerned if an object has a large mass, and it was not until a bold proposition by
Louis de Broglie in 1924 that the scientific community realized that
electrons also exhibited wave–particle duality. The wave nature of electrons was experimentally demonstrated by Davisson and Germer in 1927. Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work with the wave–particle duality on photons (especially explaining the photoelectric effect thereby), and de Broglie followed in 1929 for his extension to other particles.
Quantum electrodynamics
The quantum mechanical theory of light and electromagnetic radiation continued to evolve through the 1920s and 1930's, and culminated with the development during the 1940s of the theory of
quantum electrodynamics, or QED. This so-called
quantum field theory is among the most comprehensive and experimentally successful theories ever formulated to explain a set of natural phenomena. QED was developed primarily by physicists
Richard Feynman,
Freeman Dyson,
Julian Schwinger, and
Shin-Ichiro Tomonaga. Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions.
Light pressure
Light pushes on objects in its path, just as the wind would do. This pressure is most easily explainable in particle theory: photons hit and transfer their momentum. Light pressure can cause
asteroids to spin faster,
[20] acting on their irregular shapes as on the vanes of a
windmill. The possibility to make
solar sails that would accelerate spaceships in space is also under investigation.
[21][22]
Although the motion of the
Crookes radiometer was originally attributed to light pressure, this interpretation is incorrect; the characteristic Crookes rotation is the result of a partial vacuum.
[23] This should not be confused with the
Nichols radiometer, in which the motion
is directly caused by light pressure.
[24]
Spirituality
An intricate display for the feast of
St. Thomas at Kallara Pazhayapalli in Kottayam,
Kerala,
India dramatically illustrates the importance of light in religion.
The sensory perception of light plays a central role in spirituality (
vision,
enlightenment,
darshan,
Tabor Light). The presence of light as opposed to its absence (
darkness) is a common metaphor of
good and evil,
knowledge and
ignorance, and similar concepts. This idea is prevalent in both Eastern and Western spirituality.
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