Mr. Science talks about people and the Light

Sometimes things are better than they seem. Sometimes they're worse. Actually, we can't see very well is what the problem is.

In fact, if you remember Miss Furgis's 4th grade science class, or maybe the club last week, there's stuff like light except you can't see it. Ultraviolet light is mostly invisible, until it hits something that glows in it, then it's really neat and spooky. Infrared light is invisible but can let your camera focus or spot an intruder's glow and set off an alarm.

So "ultraviolet" means simply "beyond violet" or, higher than blue. "Infrared" means lower than red. If you take the rainbow and extend it, these are colors you can almost see, but not quite - just like sounds some people can hear but you can't.


OK, ace. Pop quiz. How many colors are there you can't see?

a) Sorry, I was talking on IM. What was the question?
b) Two - infrared and the other one you just said.
c) Most of them - I can barely see through these Foster Grant shades
d) About a thousand
e) More than a million


The answer is (e) - more than a million. There are more than a million colors, as distinct as red and blue and green and yellow, that we can't see. We can't see most colors. These eyeball things we have only see a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the world and we are stone cold blind to the rest of it.

It's like the world is in vivid color, all around us, and we barely see black and white and a few shades of gray. The rest of it we can only take on faith.

(The picture of the "electromagnetic spectrum" on the left is from Wikipedia here. Or you can just click on the image to enlarge it.)


OK, so big whoop. We all knew that. (Well, sort of. We all used to know that and forgot it as soon as the quiz was over.)

Yep. You knew it, but you never really figured out what it means to you as a person.

What it means is that you actually can't see most of what is going on right around you, let alone farther away.

Back in my astrophysics days, I took classes from Frank Drake (who now runs the SETI Institute and used to run the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo). Frank said that every time astronomers looked at the sky in a new part of the spectrum, they didn't just see things they knew about, they found entirely new things going on that no one had ever suspected before.

The sky, in other words, is BIG. So is LIFE. It has room for millions of things to be going on right around you that you, mercifully, cannot see, so you can focus on the few you can handle, and even those are sometimes too much. You don't have to see radio waves and get blinded every time someone turns on their cell phone. You aren't blinded by turning on the microwave. It's good, in a way.

But it's also good to remember that there is a whole world around us we're blind to, given these frail human bodies we occupy.

The same thing is true of sounds -- there is a whole universe of sounds too low or too high for our human ears to hear. Dogs can hear sounds that we don't even know are there, like "dog whistles." Some kids have ring-tones on their phones that are high enough pitch that no adult can hear them, only other kids.

The same thing is true of anything that's a wave, or acts like a wave, which is an amazing number of things all by itself.

There's a book out, I forget the title, on REALLY BIG THINGS like supertankers and the huge building they build the space shuttle rocket in.

REALLY BIG THINGS do not act like smaller things, just made larger, but have entirely new properties, and this keeps on surprising engineers, who by now should know better.

For example, supertankers and NASA's vehicle assembly building are large enough to have weather INSIDE them. They can have clouds and even rain inside.

The story that really caught my attention in that book, though, was of a huge ship docked somewhere on a calm day that suddenly started rocking, faster and faster, and ripped the pier it was attached to into shreds before they could stop it.

What was that about? It turns out that the ocean doesn't just have waves of sizes we "see", the ones up to 100 feet or so, but it just keeps on going, like the spectrum. There are waves of every size. The really long ones are so long and such a low frequency (like 2 beats a day), we perceive them with a new name as "tides". But there are waves that are a half-mile or kilometer long that we don't have names for too. Some days, the seas are calm in that frequency range, and other days it's busy. We don't see them at all. If we're in a tiny little sailboat the sea rises so slowly and goes down so slowly over a minute or so it's just invisible to us.

But, if you're a ship thats the same length as the waves, you can get into "resonance" where you pick up that energy and concentrate it and amplify it. The results can be astounding.

Here's another famous resonance: YouTube color video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge ripping itself to shreds on a windy but not stormy day.

Now, nifty video, nice science, but so what? The so what is a realization that there are events and waves all around us that only become "visible" as we build larger and larger social structures. The power in those waves may be enormous, even though, to our human eyes, there is nothing at all there.

Could be destructive power. Could be something we could harness for cheap free energy. Could be enormous creative power. Whatever it is, we would never be able to see it directly with our own eyes. We can only discover it is there by building a "resonant structure" of the same frequency, perhaps on purpose, perhaps by accident, that will act as a receiver and pick up the broadcast power on that frequency.


Interesting, isn't it? Even science is surprised by what it finds when it looks in a new place. We've never built planetary sized social structures that were tightly linked electronically before. We don't actually know what they'll reveal.


(photo credits and links:
Image of Ishihara color-blindness test plate from Wikipedia
Image of the Very Large Array radio telescope, at top of post, from Wikipedia - the same instrument featured in Carl Sagan's movie Contact with Jodie Foster.
Image of our neighbor in space, M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) from Wikipedia. )