Stop

Faking It!
Finally Understanding Science So You Can Teach It

LIGHT
 Stop
Faking It!
Finally Understanding Science So You Can Teach It

LIGHT

Arlington, Virginia
Claire Reinburg, Director
Andrew Cocke, Associate Editor
Judy Cusick, Associate Editor
Carol Duval, Associate Editor
Betty Smith, Associate Editor

ART AND DESIGN Linda Olliver, Director

Brain Diskin, Illustrator
NSTA WEB Tim Weber, Webmaster
PERIODICALS PUBLISHING Shelley Carey, Director
PRINTING AND PRODUCTION Catherine Lorrain, Director
Nguyet Tran, Assistant Production Manager
Jack Parker, Desktop Publishing Specialist
PUBLICATIONS OPERATIONS Erin Miller, Manager
sciLINKS Tyson Brown, Manager

NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

Gerald F. Wheeler, Executive Director
David Beacom, Publisher

Copyright © 2003 by the National Science Teachers Association.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by Victor Graphics.

Light: Stop Faking It! Finally Understanding Science So You Can Teach It
NSTA Stock Number: PB169X3
07 06 5 4 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robertson, William C.
Light.
p. cm. — (Stop faking it!)
ISBN 0-87355-215-61. Light—Study and teaching (Middle school) 2. Optics—Study
and teaching (Middle school) I. Title.
QC363.R54 2003
535'.071'273—dc21
2003004143

NSTA is committed to publishing quality materials that promote the best in inquiry-based science education.
However, conditions of actual use may vary and the safety procedures and practices described in this book are
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do not warrant or represent that the procedure and practices in this book meet any safety code or standard or
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Featuring sciLINKS®—a new way of connecting text and the Internet. Up-to-the-minute online
content, classroom ideas, and other materials are just a click away. Go to page x to learn more about this new
educational resource.
 Contents
Preface ....................................................................................... vii
SciLinks ........................................................................................ x

Chapter 1 Light—The Early Years ............................................................... 1

Chapter 2 Colorful Waves ....................................................................... 23

Chapter 3 Focus, People, Focus .............................................................. 45

Chapter 4 Not-So-Cheap Sunglasses ...................................................... 59

Chapter 5 When Light Waves Collide ................................................... 69

Chapter 6 All About Eyeballs .................................................................. 83

Chapter 7 Fire the Photon Torpedoes, Mr. Sulu! ............................... 95

Glossary ................................................................................. 103

Index ........................................................................................ 107

Preface
ack when I was in college, there was a course titled Physics for Poets. At a
B school where I taught physics, the same kind of course was referred to by the
students as Football Physics. The theory behind having courses like these was that
poets and/or football players, or basically anyone who wasn’t a science geek, needed
some kind of watered-down course because most of the people taking the course
were—and this was generally true—SCARED TO DEATH OF SCIENCE.
In many years of working in education, I have found that the vast majority
of elementary school teachers, parents who home school their kids, and parents
who just want to help their kids with science homework fall into this category.
Lots of “education experts” tell teachers they can solve this problem by just
asking the right questions and having the kids investigate science ideas on their
own. These experts say you don’t need to understand the science concepts. In
other words, they’re telling you to fake it! Well, faking it doesn’t work when it
comes to teaching anything, so why should it work with science? Like it or not,
you have to understand a subject before you can help kids with it. Ever tried
teaching someone a foreign language without knowing the language?
The whole point of the Stop Faking It! series of books is to help you under-
stand basic science concepts and to put to rest the myth that you can’t under-
stand science because it’s too hard. If you haven’t tried other ways of learning
science concepts, such as looking through a college textbook, or subscribing to
Scientific American, or reading the incorrect and oversimplified science in an
elementary school text, please feel free to do so and then pick up this book. If
you find those other methods more enjoyable, then you really are a science geek
and you ought to give this book to one of us normal folks. Just a joke, okay?
Just because this book series is intended for the nonscience geek doesn’t
mean it’s watered-down material. Everything in here is accurate, and I’ll use
math when it’s necessary. I will stick to the basics, though. My intent is to
provide a clear picture of underlying concepts, without all the detail on units,
calculations, and intimidating formulas. You can find that stuff just about any-

vii
Preface

where. Also, I’ll try to keep it lighthearted. Part of the problem with those
textbooks (from elementary school through college) is that most of the authors
and the teachers who use them take themselves way too seriously. I can’t tell you
the number of times I’ve written a science curriculum only to have colleagues
tell me it’s “too flip” or “You know, Bill, I just don’t think people will get this
joke.” Actually, I don’t really care if you get the jokes either, as long as you
manage to learn some science here.
Speaking of learning the science, I have one request as you go through this
book. There are two sections titled Things to do before you read the science stuff
and The science stuff. The request is that you actually DO all the “things to do”
when I ask you to do them. Trust me, it’ll make the science easier to understand,
and it’s not like I’ll be asking you to go out and rent a superconducting particle
accelerator. Things around the house should do the trick for most of the activi-
ties. This book also includes a few goodies (filters and a diffraction grating) for
the activities that require special equipment.
By the way, the book isn’t organized this way (activities followed by explana-
tions followed by applications) just because it seemed a fun thing to do. This
method for presenting science concepts is based on a considerable amount of
research on how people learn best and is known as the Learning Cycle. There are
actually a number of versions of the Learning Cycle but the main idea behind
them all is that we understand concepts best when we can anchor them to our
previous experiences. One way to accomplish this is to provide the learner with
a set of experiences and then explain relevant concepts in a way that ties the
concepts to those experiences. Following that explanation with applications of
the concepts helps to solidify the learner’s understanding. The Learning Cycle
is not the only way to teach and learn science, but it is effective in addition to
being consistent with recommendations from The National Science Education
Standards (National Research Council 1996) on how to use inquiry to teach sci-
ence. (Check out Chapter 3 of the Standards for more on this.) In helping your
children or students to understand science, or anything else for that matter, you
would do well to use this same technique.
As you go through this book, you’ll notice that just about everything is
measured in Système Internationale (SI) units, such as meters, kilometers, and
kilograms. You might be more familiar with the term metric units, which is
basically the same thing. There’s a good reason for this—this is a science book
and scientists the world over use SI units for consistency. Of course, in everyday
life in the United States, people use what are commonly known as English units
(pounds, feet, inches, miles, and the like).
The book you have in your hands, Light, covers three different scientific
models of what light is. Each model is useful for explaining different kinds of
observations. With those three models, you’ll be able to understand how and

viii
 Preface

why light bends, how optical instruments form images, what causes rainbows,
how to draw 3-D images, and why the sky is blue. There’s also an entire chapter
on how the eye works. I do not address a number of light topics that you might
find in a physical science textbook, choosing instead to provide just enough of
the basics so you will be able to figure out those other concepts when you
encounter them. You might also notice that this book is not laid out the way
these topics might be addressed in a traditional high school or college textbook.
That’s because this isn’t a textbook. You can learn a great deal of science from
this book, but it’s not a traditional approach.
One more thing to keep in mind: You actually CAN understand science. It’s
not that hard when you take it slowly and don’t try to jam too many abstract
ideas down your throat. Jamming things down your throat, by the way, seemed
to be the philosophy behind just about every science course I ever took. Here’s
hoping this series doesn’t continue that tradition.

Acknowledgments
The Stop Faking It! series of books is produced by the NSTA Press: Claire
Reinburg, director; Carol Duval, project editor; Linda Olliver, art director;
Catherine Lorrain-Hale, production director. Linda Olliver designed the cover
from an illustration provided by artist Brian Diskin, who also created the inside
illustrations.
This book was reviewed by Pamela Gordon (Randall Middle School, Florida);
Olaf Jorgenson (Director of Science, Social Sciences, and World Languages, Mesa
Public Schools, Arizona); and Daryl Taylor (Williamstown High School, New
Jersey).

About the Author

Bill Robertson is a science education writer, teaches online math and physics
and trains new faculty for the University of Phoenix, and reviews and edits sci-
ence materials. His numerous publications cover issues ranging from concep-
tual understanding in physics to how to bring constructivism into the class-
room. Bill has developed K–12 science curricula, teacher materials, and award-
winning science kits for Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, the United States
Space Foundation, the Wild Goose Company, and River Deep. Bill has a master’s
degree in physics and a Ph.D. in science education.

ix
How can you avoid searching hundreds of science web sites to locate the best
sources of information on a given topic? SciLinks, created and maintained by
the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), has the answer.
In a SciLinked text, such as this one, you’ll find a logo and keyword near a
concept, a URL (www.scilinks.org), and a keyword code. Simply go to the SciLinks
web site, type in the code, and receive an annotated listing of as many as 15
web pages—all of which have gone through an extensive review process con-
ducted by a team of science educators. SciLinks is your best source of perti-
nent, trustworthy Internet links on subjects from astronomy to zoology.
Need more information? Take a tour—http://www.scilinks.org/tour/

x
 1
Chapter

Light—The Early Years

I ’m going to start this book with a rather simplistic view of what light is.
There are better explanations than the one I’ll use in this chapter, and I’ll
get to those later. We’ll start with the simple explanation, though, because
it’s the easiest to understand and it does explain quite a few things. Also, histori-
cally, it’s the one that came first; hence, the title of this chapter. Before I get to
the explanation, though, you have a few —

Things to do before you read the science stuff

Find yourself a flashlight, a piece of white paper, scissors, cellophane tape, a pen
or pencil, an index card, and a mirror with at last one flat edge (a rectangular
hand mirror works best). The mirror shouldn’t have a frame, so that you can set

1
1 Chapter
Figure 1.1 a flat edge directly onto a sheet
of paper, as shown in Figure 1.1.
Cut a narrow slit (no more than
a few millimeters in width) in the
index card, as shown in Figure 1.2.
Now tape the Figure 1.2
cut index card
over the front
of the flashlight so the open end of the slit just meets the edge
of the flashlight. Check out Figure 1.3.
Turn on the
flashlight and
set it on a sheet
of white paper
that’s on a flat
surface. Adjust
the angle of the
Figure 1.3 flashlight until
you get a nar-
row beam of light that is visible all along the paper (Figure
1.4). The beam will probably spread out a bit, but as long as Figure 1.4
it’s not a lot, you’ll be okay.
Prop the mirror up against a large, heavy book or other similar
object so it’s standing vertically on its edge on the sheet of
paper. Shine your flashlight beam toward the mirror so you
can see both
Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6
the incom-
ing and the
re f l e c t e d
beam on
the sheet of
paper, as in
Figure 1.5.
Now care-
fully draw an arc that shows
the angle the incoming beam
makes with the mirror, and an-
other arc that shows the angle
the reflected beam makes with
the mirror (Figure 1.6).

2 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
Repeat this for the beam hitting the mir-
Figure 1.7
ror at a different angle (Figure 1.7). Then
repeat again for a third angle. Once you’re
done drawing these angles, compare each
incoming beam angle with each corre-
sponding reflected beam angle. If you have
a protractor (something that measures
angles), great. Otherwise, just eyeball it to
see whether one is consistently larger or
smaller than the other, or whether they’re
about the same.

The science stuff

Time for that simplistic explanation of
light, which is basically that light can be
thought of as traveling in rays, which move
in straight lines until they hit something
like a mirror. So, for example, the light emit-
ted from a lightbulb travels outward in a Figure 1.8
bunch of straight-line rays, as shown in Fig-
ure 1.8. To figure out what happens to the
light, all you have to do is follow the indi-
vidual rays that leave the bulb.
What makes this a simplistic explana-
tion of light is the fact that light does not
always travel in straight lines.1 From this
point on, I’ll refer to this explanation as
the ray model.2
Let’s use the ray model of light to
describe what happens when light reflects
off a mirror. We can represent the incom-
ing and reflected beams of light each as
a single ray of light. Actually, the beams

1
Many elementary school textbooks state, incorrectly, that light always travels in straight lines.
We’ll see later that this just isn’t true. By the time you finish this book, maybe you’ll do like I do
and cringe every time you read that mistake in a textbook.

2
The term ray model refers to the fact that representing light as rays is a scientific model. More on
what a scientific model is later in this chapter.

Stop Faking It: Light 3

1 Chapter
Figure 1.9 consist of a large number of rays of light,
but we’re just focusing on one ray per beam.
Then the mirror situation looks like Fig-
ure 1.9.
If you drew and measured carefully, you
undoubtedly discovered that the angle the
incoming beam (or ray) makes with the mir-
ror is equal to the angle the reflected beam
(or ray) makes with the mirror. Actually,
you probably didn’t get exactly the same
angle measures because a) your light beam
spread out a bit, making it difficult to get
an exact angle, and b) you didn’t draw and
measure all that carefully because you’re
not getting a grade on this project, thank
you very much. If you didn’t get exactly
equal angles, trust me—with a very narrow
beam of light and careful measurement,
you’ll get exactly equal angles every time.
So now you know how reflected light
Figure 1.10
behaves, except for the fact that I had you
measure the wrong angles! Well, not exactly
the wrong angles, but not the angles scien-
tists use when describing reflection of light.
In order to use the scientifically correct
angles, I have to define something known
as the normal to a surface. A line that is
normal to a surface is one that is perpen-
dicular to that surface. Figure 1.10 shows
the normal line for our mirror.
For a curved surface, the normal to the
surface is in a different direction at each
Figure 1.11 part of the surface, as shown in Figure 1.11.
At any rate, the angles we should mea-
sure if we’re good little scientists are the
angles the incoming and reflected beams
make with the line that is normal to the
reflecting surface. When we use those
angles, they’re called the angle of incidence
and the angle of reflection, respectively.

4 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
Turns out these two angles are also equal to
each other for any reflected beam of light (Fig-
ure 1.12). Don’t believe me? Measure them.
With the properly defined angles, we can
now write down what’s known as the law
of reflection, which is that: Figure 1.12
Angle of incidence = angle of reflection
Okay, big deal. If you’ve ever looked at a
book about light, you’ve seen the law of re-
flection written down somewhere, so why did
we just spend a whole lot of time getting to
it? There are a couple of reasons. First, it’s
important that you actually experience some-
thing before I formalize it. If you did what I
asked, then you saw firsthand that the angle
of incidence is equal to the angle of reflec-
tion. That experience beats the heck out of
believing something just because it’s written down in a book. Second, I took the
time to explain that picturing light as a bunch of rays that travel in a straight line
is just one model of what light is. The ray model is useful for explaining reflec-
tion of light but not so useful for explaining other things that light does. One of
the keys to understanding science is understanding what a scientific model is
and understanding the limitations of whatever model you’re using. In that vein,
keep the following in mind.
People who develop science concepts make them up. These ideas are not handed
down from deities on high and they are not facts. What makes concepts and
models hang around is that they help explain and predict observations. If they
cease to do that, they gradually go to the scientific model graveyard. That said, it’s
not as if you can come up with any old explanation and call it
a valid scientific theory. There are conventions for evaluating
theories to determine how good they are. The theories, or
models, that are in this book have been around awhile, so you
can be pretty sure they won’t be out of vogue tomorrow.
Topic: reflection
Before moving on, let’s recap. I introduced a ray model of
light and used it to explain how reflected light behaves. I in- Go to: www.scilinks.org
troduced normal lines and the fact that scientists measure the Code: SFL01
angles that light rays make with the normal line, rather than
the angles the light makes with the reflecting surface.

Stop Faking It: Light 5

1 Chapter
More things to do before you read more science stuff
In this section, you’re going to see what happens when light travels from one
substance to another. In the explanation section that follows, I’ll use a ray model
of light to explain what’s going on.
If you happen to have a solid, rectangu-
lar block of glass, Lucite, or other thick,
transparent material, get it. If you don’t
have anything like that, and I expect that’s
the case, find a rectangular clear glass or
Pyrex baking pan and fill it with water. I’ll
assume from here on that you’re using the
pan of water, but everything applies to the
other props. Also, grab the flashlight and
index card thingie you put together in the
first part of this chapter.
Place the pan of water on a flat surface
and dim the lights in the room or turn
them off altogether. Shine your narrow
beam of light towards the pan of water so
you can see the beam on the flat surface
before it hits the side of the pan (Figure
Figure 1.13
1.13).
You should be able to see what happens
to the light beam after it crosses into the
water. If not, move the flashlight around a
bit until you can. [Hint: The direction the
beam is moving should change once it hits
the water.]
If the light gods are smiling upon you,
you will be able to trace the path of the
light beam all the way through the water,
and then when it emerges from the other
side of the pan. More likely, though, the
light beam sort of dies out after it’s in the
water. If that’s the case, shine your flash-
light from above the pan so you can see
what the light beam does when traveling
from the water back into air (Figure 1.14).
Figure 1.14 [Hint: The beam should change direction
again as it travels from the water to the air.]

6 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
More science stuff
Figure 1.15
If you were able to follow the light beam as it
went from air to water and then back out into
the air, you should have seen something like
Figure 1.15.
This means that light rays bend, or change
direction, when they travel from air to water
and from water to air. Of course, this doesn’t
just happen with air and water. Whenever light
travels from one substance to another, it
bends. This bending is known as refraction.
And just so we have the correct terminology,
scientists talk about light traveling from one
medium3 to another, rather than from one
substance to another. Water and air are differ-
ent mediums, sugar water and plain water are
different mediums, cold water and hot water
are different mediums, and Miss Cleo and
John Edward are different mediums. Figure 1.16
It’s natural to ask why light refracts in trav-
eling from one medium to another. In fact,
that “why” question is what causes scientists
to develop scientific models. Later on, I’ll in-
troduce a scientific model of light that pro-
vides a pretty good explanation of refraction.
Our current ray model, however, doesn’t do
much to help us understand the reason for
refraction.4
The ray model does help describe what’s
going on with refraction, though. For that
description, we can use our old friend the
normal to a surface. Figure 1.16 shows a top
view of the boundary between air and water,
with the normal to that boundary drawn in.

3
See the second or third definition of this word in your local dictionary.

4
Actually, there’s something known as Fermat’s principle that, when coupled with a ray model,
provides an explanation of refraction. Because it’s kind of a strange principle, I’ll address it in the
Applications section rather than get totally off track here.

Stop Faking It: Light 7

1 Chapter
When a light ray travels from air to
water, it refracts as shown in Figure
1.17. When a light ray travels from wa-
ter to air, it refracts as shown in Fig-
ure 1.18.
Now, water is more dense than air,5
so we might be tempted to generalize
our result and say the following:

When light travels from a less

Figure 1.17 dense medium to a more dense
medium, it refracts towards the
normal. When light travels from a
more dense medium to a less
dense medium, it refracts away
from the normal.

And by golly, that turns out to

be true in all cases. In fact, there’s a
mathematical relationship that de-
scribes exactly how much and in what
direction light bends when it goes
from one medium to another. If I
could be sure everyone had a nice,
uniform block of Lucite, I could have
you sort of “discover” that relation-
ship for yourself, just as I had you
“discover” the law of reflection. But
Figure 1.18 since most of you are dealing with a
crude baking pan filled with water,
I’m just going to give you the relationship. Before I do that, though, I have to
define something known as the index of refraction. It’s represented by
the letter n, and each medium has its own value of n. Basically, the denser the
medium, the higher the index of refraction of that medium.6 The index of
refraction of a vacuum (meaning empty space rather than something Mr. Oreck

5
The more dense a medium is, the more “stuff” it has in a given volume. This usually means that
its molecules are more closely packed together than in a less dense medium.

6
The exact definition of the index of refraction of a medium is the speed of light in that medium
divided by the speed of light in a vacuum (empty space). We’ll discuss in Chapter 2 why the speed
of light should have something to do with the value of n.

8 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
would like you to buy) is 1.0, the index of refraction of water is 1.33, and the
index of refraction of glass is about 1.5.
Okay, so now it’s time to write that relationship. You won’t immediately
recognize everything, so don’t freak out, all right?
n1sinT1=n2sinT2

Note for the math phobic

Just so you don’t get totally intimidated by the symbols in an equation, here’s a
brief explanation. An equals sign means that whatever is on the left side of the
sign is numerically the same as what’s on the right hand side. If two things are in
parentheses and next to each other, as in (speed)(time), that means you multiply
the two together. If there’s a slash between those parentheses, as in (distance)/
(time), you divide the first by the second. If there are just letters and no
parentheses, two letters next to each other, as in vt, should be multiplied and two
letters with a slash in between, as in d/t, means divide the first by the second.

Figure 1.19 will be a big help in under-

standing this relationship.
We have light going from medium Figure 1.19
1 to medium 2, which can be, for ex-
ample, light going from air into glass.
The index of refraction of medium 1
is n1 and the index of refraction of
medium 2 is n2. T is the Greek letter
“theta.” T1 is the angle between the in-
cident light ray and the normal line,
and T2 is the angle between the re-
fracted light ray and the normal line.
Now sin T means you take the sine
of the angle T. What’s a sine? Well,
think back to high school math and
things called sines and cosines. If you
want to look up the actual definition
of sines and cosines, feel free to do
that. Suffice it to say they have to do
with how a particular angle relates to the triangle it might be part of. You don’t
really need the formal definitions, though, because we aren’t going to be calcu-
lating any numbers with our relationship. Oh, and by the way, n1sinT1=n2sinT2 is
known as Snell’s law.

Stop Faking It: Light 9

1 Chapter
Snell’s law works for all different mediums and it has built into it the whole
business of refracting toward or away from the normal. I’ll do one example to
convince you of that. Suppose you shine a light beam from air into a sold block
of glass and you do it at a 30-degree angle to the normal (Check out Figure 1.20).
We already know what’s going to happen—the light will bend towards the nor-
mal because it’s going from a less dense to a more dense medium.
Snell’s law will tell us exactly how much
Figure 1.20 the light refracts towards the normal. The in-
dex of refraction of air is almost equal to 1, so
we’ll just let it be 1, and the index of refraction
of glass is about 1.5. Snell’s law gives us:
n1sinT1=n2sinT2
or, in this particular case:
nairsinTair=nglasssinTglass
Putting in the values for the n’s and q’s, we get:
(1.0)(sin30°) = (1.5)(sinTglass)
It helps here if you remember that sets of paren-
theses next to each other mean multiplication.
I’m not going to bother you with the algebra we
have to do to solve for T glass (you’re welcome) 7,
so you can just trust me that the result is:
Tglass = 17.5°
This angle is smaller than 30°, meaning
the light beam refracts towards the normal.
Okay, neat. We can describe exactly what light
will do when going from
one medium to the next,
but keep in mind that it is just a description. Snell’s law
doesn’t do anything to explain why light refracts.
Time for another recap. I used a ray model of light to Topic: refraction
describe exactly how light behaves when traveling from one
medium to another. That exact description is Snell’s Law, Go to: www.scilinks.org
which is a bit more complicated than the law of reflection Code: SFL02
I introduced earlier.
7
For those of you who really want to see the steps, here’s how it goes. First divide both sides of the
equation by 1.5. After doing the math on the left side, you get 0.33 = sinTglass. This means that
sinTglass is equal to 0.33. The angle whose sine is 0.33 is 17.5°, which you can figure out on your
calculator or look up in a table of sines.

10 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
Even more things to do
before you read even more Figure 1.21
science stuff
Set up your light beam and pan of wa-
ter as in Figure 1.14, so the light travels
from the water out into the air. The
beam should refract away from the
normal, yes? Now gradually increase the
angle between the incoming beam and
the normal, as in Figure 1.21.
Keep doing this until the refracted
beam is almost parallel with the edge
of the pan. Keep increasing the angle
beyond this point, and you will get to Figure 1.22
where the entire light beam is reflected
back into the water as in Figure 1.22.

Even more science stuff

What you just observed is known as
total internal reflection. If you
were really observant in earlier sections,
you might have noticed that even when
the light beam travels on into the second medium, some of the beam is always
reflected. The greater the angle between the incident beam and the normal, the
more light is reflected rather than refracted. (You might want to go back to your
setup and verify this. Then again, maybe not!) Beginning at a certain angle,
known as the critical angle, all of the light is reflected.
And this is how fiber optics works. When you send light into the end of a
tube made of Lucite or glass or other dense, transparent substance, the light
keeps traveling along the tube, undergoing total internal reflection each time it
hits the side (Figure 1.23).

Figure 1.23

Stop Faking It: Light 11

1 Chapter
So now you know how those cool lights you get at gift shops work. You
know, the ones that have dozens of thin, glass-like strands that fan out in a circle
from the center, but only light up at the tips, as in Figure 1.24. All the light starts
at the base of the lamp, and undergoes total internal reflection all the way out to
the tips. If one of the strands bends in the middle, the middle lights up because
you’ve created a spot where the light hits the side at something less than the
critical angle, and it escapes.

Figure 1.24 We also use fiber optic cables to send informa-

tion from one place to another. We just have to turn
the entering light on and off really fast. The rate at
which the light turns off and on can carry informa-
tion. It’s sort of like sending Morse code by turn-
ing a flashlight on and off. Of course, the on and
off of a fiber optic cable is about a gazillion times
faster than turning a flashlight on and off.
If you’re in the mood for a field trip, head to
your local rock shop and ask to see a piece of ulex-
ite. Place the ulexite over some newsprint for a neat
effect. It turns out ulexite is made of tiny strands
that act just like optical fibers, so you can read the
print at the top surface of the ulexite, demonstrated
in Figure 1.25.

And even more Figure 1.25

things to do before
you read even more
science stuff
Now that you know some-
thing about reflection and
refraction, it’s time to get to
something a bit more inter-
esting. In this section, we’ll
focus on the images we see
as a result of various reflec-
tions and refractions.
Find yourself any old
mirror—the bathroom mir-
ror will work. Hold up an ob-

12 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
ject and look at its reflection in the
Figure 1.26
mirror. How far does the reflected
object appear to be from you?
Take a stab at using a diagram of
light rays to explain why the object ap-
pears where it is and how far away it is.
Look at your reflection in the back
of a metal spoon. See if you can ex-
plain why your face looks the way it
does. Is this an improvement in your
facial features?
Get a glass of water and stick your finger inside. Look at your finger from
the side and notice how the image of your finger changes as you move your
finger around the glass. See if you can explain what’s going on.

And even more science stuff

To figure out why you see what you see when looking at various reflected and
refracted images of an object, it helps to imagine that the object is emitting light
rays that travel outward in all directions.8 By tracing the paths of just a few of these
rays, we can figure out what’s going on. Let’s start with the simple one—looking at
the reflection of an object in a mirror (Figure 1.26). I’m going to draw a light ray
that goes from the object, reflects off the mirror, and goes to your eye.
Now forget the fact that you know this Figure 1.27
light is reflected off a mirror. If you didn’t
know you were looking at reflected light,
where would you say this light ray originated?
In other words, where does the actual object
appear to be? Well, the light ray has traveled a
total distance of 2d (see Figure 1.27), so we
think the object is a distance 2d away from
us.9 Being ignorant and not knowing this is a
reflection, we also assume the light rays that
leave the object travel in straight lines and
don’t bounce off things, so we think the ob-

8
Unless the object creates its own light, the light it emits is actually reflected light.

9
We use all sorts of cues to judge distance, such as the size of the image and the difference between
what the left eye and right eye see.

Stop Faking It: Light 13

1 Chapter
ject is a straight-line distance of 2d
away from us. In other words, we
see the image of the object behind
the mirror (Figure 1.28).
Figure 1.28 This is true of all images you
see in a flat mirror. They’re behind
the mirror, and they’re just as far
behind the mirror as the actual
object is in front of the mirror.
All right, what about curved
mirrors, and in particular, the back
of a spoon? Let’s trace the light rays
you see when looking at your own
reflection in the spoon. Figure 1.29
shows a top view of your head and
a flat mirror, and a top view of your
head and a curved mirror (the
spoon).
For convenience, let’s assume
Figure 1.29 you’re a cyclops with only one eye
in the middle of your head (apolo-
gies to all the cyclopses out there).
I’m going to draw light rays that
leave your ears, reflect off the mir-
ror (flat or curved), and travel to
your eye. Those rays are shown in
Figure 1.30.
Notice that, for each reflection,
Figure 1.30 the angle of incidence equals the
angle of reflection, and those angles
are the ones made with the normal
line at each reflection point. Also
notice that the direction of the nor-
mal line changes quite a bit across
the surface of the curved mirror. If
you’re really careful in drawing
those lines, you get the result in
Figure 1.30. To see what your reflec-
tion looks like, just figure out where
whose rays that hit your eye appear

14 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
to come from, assuming they travel Figure 1.31
in a straight line instead of reflect-
ing. I’ve done that in Figure 1.31.
As you can see, your reflection
in a flat mirror is the same size as
your actual head. In the curved mir-
ror, though, your head appears to
be shrunken in width. The more
sharply curved the mirror is, the
more shrunken your head appears
to be. See Figure 1.32.
Take a close look at the spoon,
and you’ll see that it is curved more
sharply from side to side than it is
along its length. See Figure 1.33.
Therefore, the image of your
head shrinks more along one direc-
Figure 1.32
tion than along the other, making
your head look long and skinny, or
short and wide, depending on how
you hold the spoon.
Okay, on to how your finger
looks in a glass of water. When you
have it on the far side of the glass,
away from your eyes, it looks pretty
darned fat. To see why, what say we
draw, umm—light rays! Instead of
being reflected, the light rays you
see have been refracted as they travel
from your finger, through the wa-
ter, and out into the air to your

Figure 1.33

Stop Faking It: Light 15

1 Chapter
eyes.10 Again, I’ll assume you are a cyclops and I’ll just draw the rays that go
from the edges of your finger. In going from a more dense medium (water) to a
less dense medium (air), the rays will bend away from the normal, and since the
side of the glass is curved, the normal will be in a different direction at different
parts of the glass. The diagram of light rays is in Figure 1.34. Note that the figure
shows only two selected light rays—those that leave the sides of your finger and
eventually, after refracting, reach your eye. When those rays leave your finger,
they are not initially headed for your eye. After they refract, however, they go
towards your eye. Any light rays that start out headed for your eye won’t reach it,
because they’ll refract when they get to the glass-air interface.
As with reflection, your uninformed eye doesn’t know the light has been
refracted. Your eye assumes the light rays hitting it traveled in a straight line. To
figure out the image your eye sees, we trace the rays that hit it back along the
direction they came from, as in Figure 1.35.
Your eye sees the image of your finger that’s dotted in Figure 1.35. In other
words, your finger looks much larger to you than it really is.11 When your finger
is on the side of the glass closest to you, the effect isn’t nearly as pronounced.
Figure 1.36 shows why.

Figure 1.34 Figure 1.35 Figure 1.36

10
You might notice that I’m ignoring the glass that holds the water. To be completely accurate, I
should include the refraction that happens when going from water to glass and then from glass
to air. All that would do is make our diagrams more complicated, and who needs that? The basic
idea is still the same.

11
A little foreshadowing here. Can you think of a use for something that makes objects look bigger
than they actually are? Sure you can.

16 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
Chapter Summary
l One model for light is that it is composed of rays that travel out in all
directions from a light source.
l When light rays go from one medium to another, the light rays could be a)
totally reflected back into the original medium, b) partially reflected and
partially transmitted into the second medium, or c) totally transmitted into
the second medium.
l Reflected light obeys the law of reflection, which states that the angle of
incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. Those angles are the angles
between the incident and reflected rays and the normal to the reflecting
surface.
l When light travels from one medium to another, it often bends, or refracts.
Snell’s law describes the exact relationship between the incident and re-
fracted rays.
l The index of refraction of a substance is a measure of how dense the sub-
stance is and also a measure of how much light refracts when it travels from
one medium to another.
l When light travels from a more dense to a less dense medium, there is a
chance that the incoming light gets totally internally reflected, meaning it
reflects back into the more dense medium. This phenomenon is the basis
for fiber optics.
l To figure out where a reflected or refracted image is formed, you first draw
light rays that come from the original object. Then you trace these rays back
along the line of the rays that come straight to the viewer. Where the rays
appear to come from is where the image is.

Applications
1. When you walk by a store or restaurant window, you not only can see the
inside of the store or restaurant, you can see a reflection of yourself. Why is
that? Well, remember that, unless you’re dealing with total internal reflec-
tion, when light travels from one medium to another, some of the light
refracts and travels on into the second medium, and some of the light re-
flects. So, the light coming off you hits the window. Some travels on through,
so the people inside can see you and talk about you. Some is also reflected,
so you can check out just how much the wind has messed with your hair. Of
course, the same thing happens in reverse, so you can see the people inside
and they can see a reflection of themselves (see Figure 1.37, next page).

Stop Faking It: Light 17

1 Chapter
Two-way mirrors work the same
way. These mirrors are silvered, but
not so much that some of the light
from you doesn’t travel on through
so someone behind the mirror can
see you. And that’s the main point
of two-way mirrors; someone uses
them to spy on someone else, as
shown in Figure 1.38.
But wait a minute. If the mir-
Figure 1.37 ror isn’t completely silvered,

Figure 1.38
shouldn’t the person in
front of the mirror be able
to see light coming from
the person behind the mir-
ror? Yes, that would be true
if there were any lights on
in the room behind the
mirror. But the people do-
ing the observing keep that
room dark, so nothing in
it, including the person be-

hind the mirror spying on you,

emits any significant light for you
to see.
Because it’s related, I now have
to tell you how they make ghosts
in the Haunted House at
Disneyland. As you ride along in
your chair, you see an empty room
in front of you. You also see ghosts
moving around. Those ghosts are
just images that are reflected from
a transparent screen in front of
you. The real objects (the ones that
lead to the ghost images) are actu-
ally below you. Check out Figure
Figure 1.39 1.39.

18 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
2. I remember as a kid riding in the car on a long stretch of road in the Ari-
zona desert, seeing what looked like water on the road up ahead. Of course
this had to be a mirage, because as everyone knows, it rains only two thou-
sandths of an inch a year in Arizona. Okay, not true. Anyway, what causes
these mirages? Well, on very hot summer days, you often get a temperature
inversion, in which the air near the road is much hotter than the air above it,
and the change from hotter to cooler air is gradual. The hotter air is less
dense than the cooler air.12 The result is that light from the sky refracts as it
travels from the more dense air to the less dense air, and gives you the
situation shown in Figure 1.40.
When you trace
Figure 1.40
the light rays reach-
ing your eyes back
along the direction
from which they
came, you see that
there’s an image of
the sky smack dab
in the middle of the
road up ahead (Fig-
ure 1.41). Sure looks
like water! Of
course, the refract-
ing light ray shown isn’t the only one emitted by that patch of sky. That
patch of sky also emits light rays that travel straight to you, so you still see
the sky where it’s supposed to be.

Figure 1.41

12
See the Stop Faking It! book Energy for an explanation of this.

Stop Faking It: Light 19

1 Chapter
Figure 1.42 3. In our house we have a security
system with little red and green
lights. I still get a little freaked out
when I see the reflection of these
lights in a window, because there
are two sets of lights in the reflec-
tion, giving more of an impression
of a tiny alien spaceship than a set
of security lights. The reason I see
two sets of lights is that the win-
dows are double-pane windows.
Figure 1.42 shows what happens to
the red and green lights.
When the light from a security light hits the inside pane, some is reflected and
some refracts on through. The refracted light emerges from the other side of the
window pane, passes through the air space between the panes, and reflects off the
second pane. Some of the light travels back through the second pane, and the result is
that you end up with two images of each light. Either that or it’s a tiny alien spaceship.
4. Here’s sort of a homework problem. First, look in a regular, flat mirror. Right and
left are reversed, right? Use the diagram in Figure 1.43 to figure out why.
Now see if you can set up two flat mirrors so they’re at right angles. Look at
yourself in this setup. Now right and left are no longer reversed. Use the ray diagram
in Figure 1.44 to figure out why.

Figure 1.43 Figure 1.44

20 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 1
5. I promised in one of the footnotes that I’d explain Fermat’s principle. It’s
kind of esoteric, so if you want to skip this, no big deal. It won’t affect your
understanding of the rest of the book.
Anyway, here are a few questions. How does light “know” that it has to
obey the law of reflection? Instead of the angle of incidence being equal to
the angle of reflection, why can’t you have something like Figure 1.45?

Figure 1.45 Also, how does light “know” that it

has to obey Snell’s law? Shown in Figure
1.46 is the path light takes when it obeys
Snell’s law (let’s suppose I calculated it
and drew it exactly). But why can’t the
light travel in the other paths shown?
Well, a French nobleman and math-
ematician named Pierre de Fermat came
up with—surprise—Fermat’s principle.
The principle states that when light goes
from one place to another, it travels a
Figure 1.46 path that takes equal or less time than
any nearby paths.13 It turns out that the
paths that obey the law of reflection and
Snell’s law also obey Fermat’s principle.
Fine, but how does the light know
to take the least amount of time? Here’s
where it gets a little strange. The path
of least time actually is the most prob-
able path for the light to take. The
nearby paths are so much less likely to
occur, that we never see light take them.
Now here’s where it gets even weirder.
If you go beyond Fermat’s time to the
1900s, you can explain what happens by saying that light actually does take
those nearby paths, but the effect of taking them cancels out. It’s still based
on probability, but it’s as if the light tests out all the
nearby paths and figures out that the least-time path is
the proper result. Of course, light doesn’t have a mind
of its own—I don’t think.

13
Note that the path of least time isn’t necessarily the shortest path. That’s Topic: properties of light
because light travels at different speeds in different mediums (see Chapter 2),
Go to: www.scilinks.org
meaning it might be quicker to have most of the path traveled in the faster
medium, even if the overall path in both mediums is longer. Code: SFL03

Stop Faking It: Light 21

 2
Chapter

Colorful Waves
know you’re probably really upset that all you

I have so far is a simple little ray model of light.

When do we get to the good stuff, you say?
How about now? As a bonus, you get to look at lots
of pretty colors.

Things to do before you read the science stuff

Figure 2.1 Grab yourself a thin rope or a long sec-
tion (maybe 10 meters) of latex tubing (try
a medical supply store). Tie one end of
the rope or tubing to a doorknob or some
other fixed object (Figure 2.1).
Quickly move the free end up and
down once. You should see a wave pulse
move down the rope (I’ll assume from
Figure 2.2 here on that you’re using a rope), as shown
in Figure 2.2.
Now move the rope up and down sev-
eral times in rapid succession to see if you
can get several pulses on the rope at once,
as shown in Figure 2.3.
This is a little difficult to see because
you have reflected pulses heading back
Figure 2.3
from the other end. Even though those
reflected pulses cause trouble, try to see a
difference when you make several pulses
quickly and when you make them even
more quickly (or as scientists say, “really
fast”). Look for any difference in the dis-
tance between individual pulses.

23
2C h a p t e r
Now get a large, shallow pan of water. This should be at least the size of pie
pan, but even larger is better. In fact, if you have a pond or lake nearby, that
would be the best place to do this. Poke the tip of your finger in the center of
the pan. You should see ripples traveling outward from your finger, much like
ripples in a pond when you drop a rock in it. Dexterity time. Repeatedly poke
your finger in the center of the pan. First do it at a relatively slow rate, say two
pokes a second. Then do it as fast as you can. Notice any difference in the
ripples when you change from slow to fast? Go back and forth between the two
rates until you see a clear difference.

The science stuff

Since I had you make a bunch of waves in the previous section, you might
jump to conclusions and think I’m going to tell you we can model light as a
bunch of waves. That would be correct, so let’s learn a little bit about waves.
First, you might have noticed that
Figure 2.4 an up-and-down motion on your
part, both for the rope and the
water, produced waves that trav-
eled to the side (Figure 2.4).
To be more precise, the waves
traveled perpendicular to the direc-
tion of motion of whatever caused
them. Waves like this are known
as transverse waves.
The second thing you might
have noticed is that the faster you
move up and down to create the
waves, the closer together they are
(Figure 2.5). In other words, the
waves themselves are smaller. If
Figure 2.5
you didn’t notice that, go back and
do it again. I’ll wait.
With smaller waves that are
closer together, more of them pass
a given point in a given time than
do larger and farther apart waves.
In order to keep track of the size
of waves and how fast they pass a
given point, we have a couple of
definitions.

24 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
wavelength. The distance in Figure 2.6
which a series of waves repeats
itself.1 A couple of examples are
shown in Figure 2.6.
frequency. The number of
wavelengths that pass a given
point per second.

Figure 2.7 Let’s assume you have a bunch of waves that all travel
at the same speed, and suppose these waves are all
going past you (Figure 2.7).2
If someone comes by and shortens the wavelength of
these waves, what happens to the frequency?

Figure 2.8

Well, with shorter

wavelengths, more wave-
lengths pass you in a given
time, so that means the
frequency increases (Figure
2.8). By the same token, in-
creasing the wavelength
lowers the frequency. That
gives us the following rule:

For waves traveling at

the same speed, when
wavelength increases,
frequency decreases.
When wavelength de-
creases, frequency in-
creases.

1
It might be useful to think of one wavelength as the distance from one “crest” to another.

2
You probably didn’t, or couldn’t, notice, but the waves you produced on the rope in the previous
section actually did travel at the same speed, regardless of how fast you moved the end of the
rope. You’ll just have to trust me on that one.

Stop Faking It: Light 25

2C h a p t e r
What I’ve told you so far applies to all kinds of waves, but what does this
have to do with light? Water waves and waves on a rope aren’t the same as light
waves, are they? Yes and no. Yes, because light waves have a frequency and wave-
length associated with them, and those two things obey the relationship I talked
about above. No, because light waves are caused by something other than a
person moving a rope or water up and down.
Time for a short digression. Remember back when you were 18 months old
and you learned about atoms and molecules? As a refresher, here’s how it works.
Just about everything in the world (except light!) is made of molecules, and
molecules are made of itsy bitsy things called atoms. Atoms, in turn, are made of
itsier bitsier things called protons, neutrons, and electrons. What might come to
mind is a picture of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons
moving in circles around the nucleus. Never mind that such a picture is really
inaccurate—it‘ll do for now. By the way, the electrons in our model of an atom
basically have no size whatsoever, making them about the smallest little devils
you can imagine. Of course, I’m saying this as if the existence of electrons is an
unchangeable fact. Their existence is no such thing. Electrons are part of a scien-
tific model, and as I said before, scientists make up scientific
models. Those little tiny electrons that no one can see might
or might not exist, and it’s a sure bet you don’t see them
flying around. In the end, it’s a matter of your philosophy of
Topic: wavelength life as to whether or not electrons exist. At any rate, and here’s
Go to: www.scilinks.org the important point, the world behaves as if electrons do ex-
ist. So from here on out, we’ll assume they exist.
Code: SFL04
After all that, here’s how to make light waves: move an
electron up and down, just as you would move the end of a rope up and down (see
Figure 2.9). Now that’s not entirely correct, but it’s pretty close to correct. Until we
get to the next section at least, let’s assume that the way you make light waves is to
move electrons up and down (ac-
tually, sideways works, too). The Figure 2.9
faster you move them, the higher
the frequency of the waves you
create, just as with waves on a
rope. The slower you move them,
the lower the frequency of the
waves you create. And of course
that earlier business about fre-
quency and wavelength applies
here. Higher frequency means
shorter wavelength and lower fre-
quency means longer wavelength.

26 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
One final thing in this section. Figure 2.10
When you made ripple waves in the
pan of water (Figure 2.10), did you no-
tice that the wave crests formed what
you might call a “front,” meaning that
all the wave crests created at the same
time traveled outward as one?
If you didn’t notice that, go back
and take another look. In the last part
of this chapter, I’ll be explaining how
refraction works, and it will help there
to view light in terms of wave fronts.
Before I go on, let me make it
clear that we now have two models
for what light is. One is a ray model,
where light travels in straight lines and
only changes direction when it goes
from one medium to another. The
second is a wave model, where light travels in waves that have a wavelength and
a frequency associated with them. Using this model, we’ll be able to explain why
light is able to change direction even when it doesn’t change mediums. Stay
tuned for that in Chapter 5. I know, you can’t wait!

More things to do before you read more science stuff

This is an easy section. Search around the house for a crystal, some leaded glass,
a prism, or anything that produces a rainbow when light shines through it. If
you don’t have anything like that around, rent the movie Pollyanna and vicari-
ously enjoy the part where the kids hang all sorts of crystals in the window of
the previously mean person’s house, creating a room full of rainbows. No video
store nearby? Get the “rainbow peephole” that came with this book. Look through
it at any old lightbulb and say “oooh” and “aaah” as you see all the pretty colors.

More science stuff

News flash: White light is composed of all colors. You know that because prisms,
crystals, and diffraction gratings3 (that’s what the rainbow peephole is) separate
white light into all its component colors. Which brings up a question. What’s

3
I’ll explain what a diffraction grating is and why it makes rainbows in Chapter 5.

Stop Faking It: Light 27

2C h a p t e r
the difference between different colors of light, other than the fact that they’re
different colors? It turns out that different colors of light have different wave-
lengths. Red light has the longest wavelength, and violet light has the shortest
wavelength. Other colors have wavelengths in between these two in size. To
picture this, we can draw a sort of graph of what’s known as the visible spec-
trum, as in Figure 2.11.

Figure 2.11

wavelengths in nanometers (nm)

The strange units that wavelengths of light are measured in are nanom-
eters. One nanometer is equal to 0.000000001 meters. So a wave of red light,
with a wavelength of about 650 nanometers, is 650 times 0.000000001 meters, or
0.00000065 meters long. That’s tiny! So although you can see water waves and
waves on a rope, there is no way you can see directly that light is made of waves.
In addition to drawing a graph that shows the wavelengths of light, we draw
a graph that shows the frequencies of light. And there it is in Figure 2.12.4

Figure 2.12

frequency in millions of megahertz

A couple of things to notice. First, red and blue have switched ends. That’s
because shorter wavelengths have higher frequencies, and longer wavelengths
have lower frequencies. Second, we have more strange units on this graph. What
in the heck is a hertz? One hertz is a unit of 1/seconds. Remember that fre-

4
One way to remember the order of colors in the visible spectrum is to use the acronym ROY G.
BIV, which represents red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Note that I left out
indigo in the diagram.

28 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
quency is the number of wavelengths that pass a given point per second. That’s
why the unit is 1/seconds.5 The unit is named not for a car rental company, but
for physicist Heinrich Hertz.
Remember I said you can create light waves by moving an electron up and
down? I also said that’s not quite an accurate picture. What you get when you
physically move electrons up and down are radio waves.6 So what I’m going to do
is describe in detail what radio waves are. After that, I’ll tie that description to a
description of light. Trust me; it’ll all come together into one nice picture!
For starters, what do radio waves travel on? Waves on a rope travel along the
rope and water waves travel on the water. In these cases, something you can
touch (the rope, the water) actually moves up and down as the waves pass by.
Radio waves, however, seem to magically get from that antenna up on the hill to
your radio. You don’t see the waves passing by as you might see water waves
passing by (Figure 2.13). Figure 2.13
The trick is that the things
that move up and down (and also
sideways and every other direc-
tion) are made-up, invisible things
called electric fields and magnetic
fields. That might come across as
‘It’s the fairies, silly!” but that’s
my story and I’m sticking to it.
Seriously, charged-up things like
electrons exert forces on other
charged-up things, and electric
and magnetic fields are part of the
scientific model that physicists use
to explain all that interaction.
So here’s the model of radio
waves. Moving an electron up and

5
This might seem like an odd unit. You’re probably familiar with units such as meters, seconds, or
even meters per second. What does it mean to have just seconds in the denominator? The key
here is that frequency is a number of wavelengths per second, or a number of vibrations per
second. Those numbers don’t have any units attached; they’re just numbers. So, we end up with
units only in the denominator.

6
You don’t create radio waves by holding an electron in your hand and jiggling it. Instead, you
make the electrons in a wire (an antenna) move up and down by rapidly switching the direction
of the thing (think battery and you’ll be close) that makes the electrons move one way or the
other.

Stop Faking It: Light 29

2C h a p t e r
down generates changing electric and magnetic fields, and these changing fields
cause each other to travel through different mediums, including empty space.

Figure 2.14

The changing electric and magnetic fields are at right angles (perpendicular)
to each other, and the overall direction of motion is perpendicular to the direc-
tions of the changing fields (Figure 2.14). Also notice that what we have is a wave,
with a definite wavelength and of course, a definite frequency. The faster you
jiggle the electrons up and down to start the radio waves, the higher the frequency
and the smaller the wavelength of the radio waves. Of course, you know all about
radio waves having different frequencies, as you tune your radio to pick up sta-
tions that broadcast at different frequencies.
Before moving on, let’s recap. By jiggling electrons around, you can create
radio waves that move along all by themselves, even in empty space. Radio waves
consist of changing electric and magnetic fields, and they can have different
frequencies and wavelengths. And by the way, these waves are called, not surpris-
ingly, electromagnetic waves.
Electromagnetic waves are called radio waves in the frequency range of about
1 kilohertz to about 100 megahertz.7 If you increase the frequency beyond 100
megahertz, you end up with microwaves. Yep, those same waves you use to cook
your food. So the only difference between microwaves and radio waves is the
frequency. Microwaves consist of changing electric and magnetic fields, just like
radio waves.
Maybe you can see where this is going. If not, I’ll tell you. If you increase
the frequency of electromagnetic waves all the way up to around 400 million
megahertz, you’re at the frequency of visible light. And in fact, that is what you
have—light. Light waves are electromagnetic waves, just like radio and micro-
waves. The only difference between light waves and other electromagnetic waves

7
1 kilohertz is equal to 1000 hertz and 1 megahertz is equal to 1000 kilohertz.

30 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
is the frequency. This leads us to a graph you’ve probably seen before. Figure
2.15 shows what’s known as the electromagnetic spectrum.

Figure 2.15

You might notice a few familiar names in the electromagnetic spectrum—infra-

red light, ultraviolet light, X rays, and gamma rays. All of these are electromagnetic
waves that just differ from one another in frequency and wavelength. Also, note that
visible light makes up a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
I told you that all you have to do is increase the frequency of electromag-
netic waves enough and you get visible light, and that’s true. However, by the
time you get to the frequency of visible light, the notion of jiggling electrons
around, or even doing the equivalent of having them go around in circles really
fast, totally breaks down. The electromagnetic waves that are produced act as if
jiggling electrons made them, but for reasons that go beyond the scope of this
book, physicists are quite certain that’s not what the electrons are doing when
they produce light. I’ll give you sort of a vague idea of what they are doing in the
last chapter of this book.

Even more things to do before you

read even more science stuff Topic: electromagnetic spectrum
Now that we have a model of what light waves are, Go to: www.scilinks.org
we’re ready to look at what happens when you com-
Code: SFL05
bine paints, filters, and different-colored lights to pro-
duce new colors. The explanation will involve how
light waves interact with matter.
Three different-colored filters came with this book. Get ‘em and look through
them at all sorts of different colored objects. You should notice a few odd things,
such as the fact that blue objects look black when you look at them through a
red filter. Why do you suppose that happens?

Stop Faking It: Light 31

2C h a p t e r
If you can’t figure that one out, then try a simpler question. Forget about
looking through filters—why is any object the color it is? What makes red things
red, green things green, and fuchsia things fuchsia?
While you’re pondering that question, try holding combinations of filters
up to the light. You know, use blue and yellow to make green, and stuff like that.
Takes you right back to fourth grade art class, huh? What do you think causes
you to see the new colors? What happens when you put red and blue together?
Were you expecting purple?8
Get various paint colors (your kid’s watercolors will do) and combine differ-
ent colors to create new ones. Compare the colors you get mixing paints with
the colors you get looking at a light source through combinations of filters.
And now for something completely different.9 Find a friend and three flash-
lights. Tape one colored filter, or gel, to each of the flashlights so they produce
red, blue, and yellow light. With
your friend’s help, shine various Figure 2.16
combinations of light onto a white
sheet of paper (Figure 2.16).
Check out all possible combina-
tions of two colors, and then shine
all three of them on the spot at once
(here’s where you need your friend).
Notice how yellow and blue make
green, just as before. Er, well—no
they don’t.

Even more science stuff

With a ray model of light, we thought of light as either bouncing off some-
thing (reflection) or traveling right on through a substance and possibly re-
fracting. In order to explain what you just observed, however, I’m going to
give you a different view of what’s going on when light interacts with matter.10
Picture an object as being composed of tiny little atoms, with each atom con-

8
When you put together the red and blue filters that come with this book, you might convince
yourself that you see a very dark purple. Then again, it might just look black.

9
Apologies to Monty Python.

10
What I mean by “matter” is any kind of material—water, a mirror, a rock, a leather jacket, a piece
of glass, or whatever.

32 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
taining electrons. Now, just as electrons can create light waves, when light
waves run into electrons, it’s possible for those light waves to cause the elec-
trons to do something. For now, we’ll stick with that incorrect idea that the
electrons jiggle around. In general, there will be some kind of interaction
between the incoming light and the electrons in the atoms of the object. In
fact, what happens is that the atoms absorb and then reradiate the incoming
light (Figure 2.17).
When they reradiate Figure 2.17
the light, they don’t always
reradiate the same fre-
quency as the incoming
light. And actually that’s all
you need to know to un-
derstand why different ob-
jects are different colors.
Suppose you have a yellow
shirt on. White light (con-
taining all colors) hits your
shirt. The atoms in your
shirt are such that they ab-
sorb all the frequencies of
light and then reradiate
only the frequencies corresponding to yellow light (Figure 2.18).
At this point, you might be wondering why a yellow cotton shirt reradi-
ates different colors from a
Figure 2.18 blue cotton shirt. After all,
they’re made of the same
material. The answer is in
the dye used to color the
shirts. The molecules in yel-
low dye are structurally dif-
ferent from the molecules in
blue dye, so they react dif-
ferently to the incoming
light and reradiate different
frequencies of that light.
It’s a short step from this
to figuring out how filters
work. When light hits a filter,
that filter absorbs all but a
certain range of frequencies,

Stop Faking It: Light 33

2C h a p t e r
and that certain range passes on through the filter (Fig-
Figure 2.19 ure 2.19).11
We can represent this process with a graph that shows
how much of each frequency different colors of light
contain. For example, Figure 2.20 shows this graph for
white light. It contains all the colors (all the visible fre-
quencies) plus probably some infrared and ultraviolet
light, which is why the graph looks the way it does.

Figure 2.20

Now let’s draw

this same kind of
graph for the light
that makes it through
the blue filter (Figure
Figure 2.21
2.21).
Notice that this
filter doesn’t let just
blue light through.
There’s some green
and violet light in
there, too. 12 Even
though those other
colors make it
through the filter, the
light still looks blue to
us. Figure 2.22 shows
similar graphs for

11
Technically, the light that makes it through a filter is reradiated light, but it’s convenient to think
of this light as just passing through the filter.

12
By the way, you could make a filter that only lets the frequencies corresponding to blue light pass,
but that filter would be too expensive to include with this book!

34 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
light that passes through a red filter and light that passes through a yellow filter.

Figure 2.22

One way to look at what filters do is to say they subtract from the incoming
light. A red filter takes white light and subtracts out all frequencies but those
shown in Figure 2.22.
Okay, why does a blue Figure 2.23
object look black when you
look at it through a red filter?
Just look at the frequency
graphs in Figures 2.23 and 2.24.
The red filter only allows
the frequencies on the left to
pass through it, and the blue
object only emits the frequen-
cies on the right. There’s no
overlap, meaning none of the
blue light from the object gets
through the red filter. No light
means the object looks black.
Figure 2.24
Similarly, red objects look
black when you view them
through a blue filter.
Let’s move on to combi-
nations of filters. What hap-
pens when you look through
both a yellow and a blue fil-
ter? Again, look at the fre-
quency graphs.
The only light that makes
it through both filters is the
light in the region of overlap.
And guess what? Those are the

Stop Faking It: Light 35

2C h a p t e r
frequencies that correspond to green light! Simple, huh? You can use this same
reasoning to figure out why a combination of red and yellow filters gives you
orange light.13 But what about red and blue together? They’re supposed to make
purple, right? No, not always. With a red and blue filter, you have the frequency
graph shown in Figure 2.25. There’s virtually no overlap at all, so no light makes
it through both filters.14

Figure 2.25 Okay, if that’s true, then

why can you mix red and blue
paints to get purple? Actually,
if you mix a dark blue paint
with a dark red paint, you will
pretty much get black instead
of purple. To get a nice purple
color, you need to mix some
white paint in with the red
and blue, and that makes for
a much more complicated
situation than just putting a
red and blue filter together.
Let’s stop here and real-
ize that the two processes—combining filters and mixing paints—give essentially
the same results. Both processes are examples of color subtraction. Both filters
and paints absorb certain frequencies of light (that’s the subtraction) and reradi-
ate others. With color subtraction, combining blue and yellow produces green.
So now we’re set. We know what always happens when you add the colors red,
yellow, and blue, right? Nope. Remember that when you used flashlights to shine
blue and yellow light on a single spot on white paper, you didn’t end up with
green. That means combining blue and yellow doesn’t always give you green. The
key to understanding this is that when you shine two lights on a single spot, you
are adding the separate frequencies of light
(Figure 2.26). Figure 2.26

13
The yellow filter that came with this book actu-
ally lets through quite a bit of red light. There-
fore, combining the red and yellow filters gives
you more of a reddish orange than a pure or-
ange color.

14
The red filter that came with this book actually
lets a tiny bit of violet light through, so instead
of black you might see a very dark purple color.

36 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
Let’s take a look at this using the frequency graphs. As before, we have the
separate graphs for blue and yellow in Figure 2.27.
Because we’re add- Figure 2.27
ing light instead of sub-
tracting light, we add in
the places where the
two graphs overlap.
The result is in Figure
2.28.
You can see that by
adding these frequen-
cies, we get something
closer to white light (all
frequencies) than we
had before. The only
frequencies missing are
the reds and a little bit
of orange. That’s why Figure 2.28
you see a washed out
area where the beams
overlap, instead of the
color green. If you add
a third f lashlight to
shine red light on the
same spot, you will end
up with a white spot.
To sum up, color subtraction produces new colors by removing frequencies
of light. Color addition produces new colors by adding separate frequencies of
light.

And even more things to do before you read even more

science stuff
Right about now, you’re undoubtedly thinking to yourself, “Sure, that’s fine
finding out about the electromagnetic spectrum and how filters work, but what
causes rainbows and why is the sky blue?” Thought you’d never ask. As usual,
before I give you the answers, you have to do a couple of things.
Go outside when the Sun is shining, and when it’s relatively low in the sky
(avoid the hours between ten and two, unless you live in Alaska and the Sun is

Stop Faking It: Light 37

2C h a p t e r
always low in the sky). Figure 2.29
Grab a garden hose with a
spray attachment and
make sure the hose is con-
nected to a faucet. Stand
with the Sun at your back
and spray water in front of
you (Figure 2.29).
You should see a rain-
bow in the spray of water.
If not, reposition the spray
until you do.
Now head back inside
and find a large, clear
bowl. Fill it with water and
nab a flashlight and some
milk (Figure 2.30). Set up
the bowl so you can shine the flashlight through it and see the spot it makes on
a wall on the other side of the bowl.
Figure 2.30

Begin adding drops of milk to the water. As you do, notice two things: a) the
color the bowl of water appears to be when you look at it from the side and b)
the color of the spot on the wall. Keep adding drops of milk until the bowl of
water is a definite blue color and the spot on the wall is red. Neat, huh?

And even more science stuff

Before I get to rainbows and blue sky, I’m going to use a wave model to explain
refraction, as I promised in Chapter 1. Remember that when light interacts with
matter, the atoms and molecules in the matter absorb and reradiate the light.
This is true even when light passes through something clear like glass. All this
absorption and reradiation takes time, which means that light slows down when
it travels through matter. The denser the medium, the slower light moves through
it. As an aside, the fastest light moves is when it’s traveling though empty space,

38 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
or a vacuum. In that case, we let c represent the speed of light; c has a value of
300,000,000 meters per second, or 186,000 miles per second.15
Now let’s look at what Figure 2.31
happens when light waves
travel from air into a block
of glass. We’re going to
look at light as traveling in
wave fronts.
When these wave
fronts hit the glass, they’re
going to move more slowly
because glass is denser
than air. To figure out
what that means for the
waves, pretend these wave
fronts are lines of people
in a marching band.16 Also
pretend the air is a dry
Figure 2.32
field and the glass is a
muddy field. When the
people in the band reach
the mud, they’ll slow
down. What’s going to
happen in Figure 2.31
then, is that the bottom
part of each wave front
(line of people) is going to
reach the glass (muddy
field) before the upper
part. As each successive
part of the wave front (line
of people) reaches the glass (muddy field), it in turn slows down. The result is
that the wave front (line of people) bends as shown in Figure 2.32.
So that’s how refraction comes about. It’s because light waves travel at dif-
ferent speeds in different mediums. To take this further, different frequencies of
light slow down different amounts when they hit a denser medium. That means
they refract different amounts when they hit a denser medium. And that means

15
This is pretty darned fast. Light can travel about seven times around the Earth in a single second.

16
To keep things simple, let’s assume we’re talking about light of a single frequency.

Stop Faking It: Light 39

2C h a p t e r
that when white light hits a block of glass, the different colors spread out. That’s
why a prism breaks white light into its component colors. Pink Floyd made a
valiant attempt to help the world discover this fact with the cover art on Dark
Side of the Moon.
Figure 2.33 On to rainbows. To figure out
those, let’s look at what happens
when sunlight hits a drop of water.
If the sunlight, water drop, and you
are all in just the right positions,
here’s what will happen: light re-
fracts as it enters the water drop, and
the colors separate as they travel
through the drop. When the light
hits the back of the drop, at least
some of it reflects as shown in Fig-
ure 2.34 and travels back through the
drop to you.
Finally, I’ll explain the light and
milky water setup. Different-sized
molecules tend to absorb and rera-
diate some frequencies more than
others. Milk molecules are particu-
larly good at absorbing and reradiating blue light, and the reradiated light tends

Figure 2.34

40 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
to be in a plane that is perpendicular to the Figure 2.35
direction of the incoming light. So when
white light hits the milk molecules, they
absorb and reradiate the blue part of the
spectrum out to the side.
As you add more and more milk to the
water in the bowl, more and more blue light
is scattered to the side, and the liquid looks
blue. Because much of the blue light is scat-
tered to the side and removed from the
flashlight beam, the spot on the wall gets
redder and redder (see Figure 2.35).
This same process occurs in the Earth’s
atmosphere as shown in Figure 2.36. Sun-
light hits tiny molecules in the atmosphere,
and, like the milk molecules in the water,
these molecules scatter blue light off to the Figure 2.36
sides, making the sky appear blue.17
This also explains red sunsets, as shown
in Figure 2.37. The molecules in the atmo-
sphere scatter blue light off to the sides, leav-
ing primarily red light to travel on through
to the viewer. Any clouds or smoke between
you and the Sun enhance this effect. The
reason this happens at sunrise and sunset
and not midday is that when you view the
Sun as it’s going up or going down, you view
it through a larger section of atmosphere
than at midday.

Figure 2.37

17
For the record, this is known as Rayleigh scattering.

Stop Faking It: Light 41

2C h a p t e r
Chapter Summary
l In addition to being viewed as rays, light can be modeled as a series of waves.
These waves consist of changing electric and magnetic fields that can travel
through empty space, as well as through other mediums.
l The wavelength of a wave is the distance in which the wave repeats itself.
The frequency of a wave is the number of wavelengths that pass a given
point in a second. An increase in wavelength means a decrease in frequency,
and vice versa.
l Different frequencies of light waves correspond to different colors of light.
White light is composed of all the colors of visible light. Visible light is just
a small portion of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves.
l When light interacts with matter, it is usually absorbed and then reradiated.
The exact nature of the reradiated light accounts for objects being different
colors and accounts for how different frequencies of light refract differently.

Applications
1. Did you ever have a game where you had to slip cards into a sleeve with a red
window in order to read what’s on the card? If so, today is your lucky day
because I’m going to show you how those work. First find a red pencil and
a blue pencil (raid your kids’ stash of colored pencils). Write your name, or
anything else you want, with the blue pencil on a white sheet of paper. Now
use the red pencil to write a whole bunch of letters and numbers over the
top of your name until you can no longer read what’s written in blue.

Now look at this mess through the red filter that came with this book.
Magic? Nah, just science. The red filter only allows red light to pass through
it. Therefore, the white paper and the letters and numbers you wrote over
your name all look red. The blue writing, however, looks black because the

42 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 2
filter won’t allow blue light to pass. You end up with black writing against a
red background, which is pretty easy to see.

2. Turn on your television set and look closely at the screen using a magnifying
glass. You should be able to see that the screen is full of very small lines of
blue, red, and green.18 What’s up with that? Well, your television actually
produces only those colors. Using just those colors of light and color addi-
tion, the set produces every color possible. This is just like what you can do
with three separate flashlights and colored filters. The separate colors on
the screen are so tiny that your eye blends them all together.
3. If you’ve ever mixed paints, you know that paint mixing is a color subtraction
process, because mixing yellow and blue gives you green. This color subtrac-
tion comes about because each color of paint absorbs all the frequencies of
light except a limited range that corresponds to its color. It’s just like stack-
ing filters on top of each other. There is one kind of painting, though, that
uses both color subtraction and color addition. In
pointillism, the painter paints lots and lots of tiny dots
of different colors. When you’re close to the painting,
you can see the dots, but when you’re far away, your
eye blends the colors, adding them to form new colors. Topic: light and color
What appears black or brown from a distance actually
Go to: www.scilinks.org
has no black or brown in it. Check out the paintings of
Georges Seurat, and if you can get your hands on a Code: SFL06
video of the Broadway play Sunday in the Park with Topic: dispersion of light
George, watch it and cry.
Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL07

18
The generally accepted “primary colors” for color addition are blue, red, and green. The reason I
included blue, red, and yellow filters with this book is so I could draw a clear distinction between
color subtraction (in which blue and yellow combine to make green) and color addition (in which
blue and yellow combined do not produce green).

Stop Faking It: Light 43

 3
Chapter

Focus, People, Focus!

I t’s time to take some of the things we know about light and put them to
good use. In this chapter, I’ll discuss various optical instruments like an-
tennae and lenses, and in the Applications section, you get to learn how
telescopes work. That’s just too darned exciting, isn’t it? In case you’re wonder-
ing what the heck this chapter title refers to, it’s a phrase theater directors are
often heard saying, and you’ll understand what it has to do with the material in
the chapter once you’ve read it.

45
3C h a p te r
Things to do before you read the Figure 3.1
science stuff
Find a large bowl (if you have a wok, even better)
and line the inside of it with aluminum foil (Figure
3.1). Make sure the shiny side is facing out and do
what you can to smooth any wrinkles.
Take this outside on a sunny day and hold the bowl so the inside of it faces
the Sun, as shown in Figure 3.2.
Figure 3.2
Now, while holding the bowl towards the Sun sun
and being careful not to block sunlight from hit-
ting the foil, place your finger at various places on
the inside of the bowl. I’m not talking about touch-
ing the aluminum foil but rather exploring the
entire space where water would be if you filled the
bowl with water. See if you can find one spot that’s
warmer than all the others.
Figure 3.3 Head back inside, get one of those flashlights you’ve
been using, and take it apart. Actually, you don’t have to take
it apart completely—just do what you have to do to remove
the shiny reflecting part, shown in Figure 3.3.
Notice any similarity between this reflector and your
foil-covered bowl? You should. Now put the flashlight back
together and notice where the flashlight bulb is in relation-
ship to the reflector. Compare this position with the position
of the “hot spot” in your foil-covered bowl or wok.

The science stuff

If you were careful about feeling around for the warmest spot inside the foil-
covered bowl, you probably found that spot
somewhere near what is shown in Figure 3.4.
Why should it feel hotter there than any- Figure 3.4
where else? First you need to realize that sun-
light doesn’t just contain visible light. It also
contains infrared and ultraviolet light. Infra-
red light is radiated heat—the stuff that makes
you feel warm when you stand in the sun. This
means that the spot in Figure 3.4 must be a

46 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 3
place where you get hit with more than your usual Figure 3.5
amount of infrared light. To see why this is, all we have
to do is figure out what happens to any electromag-
netic waves that hit the bowl. We can use a simple ray
diagram to do that. Figure 3.5 shows light from the
Sun hitting the bowl. Because the Sun is so far away,
the light that hits the bowl is essentially all moving in
the same direction and the incoming rays are parallel
to one another. These parallel rays hit the sides of the
bowl and reflect off.
Because the bowl is curved (as most bowls
are), the incoming light rays all get reflected Figure 3.6
into the center of the bowl. This concentra-
tion of light, which includes infrared light,
makes for a hot spot (Figure 3.5).
A bowl doesn’t really send all the in-
coming light rays to one point. In order to
accomplish that, you need a special shape
known as a parabola.1 With a parabolic
shape, all the incoming light would reflect
exactly to one special spot known as the
focus of the parabola2 (Figure 3.6).
A wok is actually much closer to being
parabolic (this is by design, so food that
hits the sides is directed towards the middle
of the wok), so it will produce a warmer
hot spot than will a bowl.
Aside from the fact that you’ve got a great start on a solar cooker (place a
marshmallow at the focus and see what happens), what good is all this? Well,
take a look at microwave antennae, satellite dishes, and large radio telescopes
(look these up on the Internet). They’re all parabolas, designed to take incom-
ing electromagnetic waves and concentrate them in a single spot (the focus).

1
Parabolas can be wide or narrow, tall or short. Their shape is determined by a specific mathemati-
cal-geometrical relationship, and it’s not always obvious from looking whether or not a given
shape is a parabola. It’s a pretty sure bet that your average kitchen bowl is not a parabola.

2
Stupid joke time. The mother named the family cattle ranch “Focus” because it’s the place where
her sons raise meat. Okay, I’ll explain it. If you aim a parabolic reflector at the Sun, the Sun’s rays
will meet at the focus of the parabola. Therefore, the focus is where the Sun’s rays meet. Told you
it was stupid!

Stop Faking It: Light 47

3C h a p te r
Figure 3.7 Place your receiver at the focus and you’re
in business, as shown in Figure 3.7.
All right, what about the flashlight?
You don’t use flashlights to collect elec-
tromagnetic waves but you do use them to
send out electromagnetic waves. A flash-
light reflector just does the reverse of what
Figure 3.8 our foil-covered bowl did. Light that leaves
the focus of a parabola hits the sides and
leaves as parallel rays, as in Figure 3.8.
Place the flashlight bulb at the focus
of the reflector, and you send out light in
a set of more-or-less parallel rays. Of course,
some flashlights are better than others.
Cheap flashlights have reflectors that aren’t
parabolic and have bulbs that aren’t exactly
at the focus of the reflector.
To go beyond flashlights, you can ob-
viously send out any kind of electromag-
netic waves using a parabolic reflector. All
you have to do is put the source of those
waves at the focus, and turn it on. What
this means is that a microwave transmitter
looks exactly like a microwave receiver.

More things to do before you read more science stuff

Get an empty toilet paper tube, a small sheet of construction paper (any color),
a small sheet of waxed paper, and a couple of rubber bands. Use the rubber
bands to place the construction paper and waxed paper over the ends of the
Figure 3.9

48 National Science Teachers Association

 Chapter 3
tube, as shown in Figure 3.9. Use a pin to poke a tiny hole in the center of Figure 3.10
the construction paper side of the tube.
Now find a light source. A regular lightbulb will do, and so will a
candle flame (be careful with this one, though!), but the best thing to use
is a long, tube-shaped lightbulb like the one in Figure 3.10. You can get a 25-
watt bulb that will fit into a normal socket at most any store for less than
two bucks, and I’m going to ask you to get one of these in Chapter 5, so
why not get one now?
With your light source on, hold the tube so the construction paper
side (with the pinhole) faces the light. Look at the waxed paper side of the
tube as you move the tube around a bit. Also move the tube toward and
away from the light source and see what happens (Figure 3.11).
You should get a
Figure 3.11 pretty clear image on the
waxed paper of the fila-
ment of the bulb if the
bulb is transparent, the
entire bulb if the bulb is
frosted, or the flame.
Notice anything strange
about the image? How
does the image change
when you move the tube
back and forth and side
to side?

More science stuff

What you just made is known as a pinhole camera, which makes sense be-
cause it has a pinhole in it! We can use a ray diagram to see how it works, and
why the image you saw was upside down. The light source sends light rays out in
all directions, but only a tiny portion of those light rays make it through the
pinhole. Figure 3.12 shows a couple of those rays, one from the top of the light
source and one from the bottom. As they go through the pinhole, these rays
cross, leading to an upside-down image.

Figure 3.12

Stop Faking It: Light 49

3C h a p te r
Similar diagrams in Figure 3.13 show why the image gets larger or smaller as
you move the tube towards or away from the light source.

Figure 3.13

If you were to place a sheet of photographic film where the waxed paper is,
you could use this tube to actually take a picture of the light source. In fact,
most cameras don’t operate much differently from your pinhole camera. All
you need to do is add a lens. Before you do that, though, maybe we should
figure out how lenses work.

Even more things to do before you read even more

science stuff
Find the flashlight and index card contraption you used so much in Chapter 1.
Get a clear glass and fill it with water and then find a way to darken the room
slightly. Turning off the lights sometimes works. Set the glass of water on a table
and shine your narrow light beam through the water. Start at one side of the
glass and move across to the other side. As you do this, observe what happens to
the light beam that emerges from the other side of the glass (Figure 3.14).
Figure 3.14

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If you have a magnifying glass around (one of those cheapo plastic ones will
work), get it. Shine the light beam through the magnifying glass, moving it from
one side to the other as you did with the glass of water. Again notice what hap-
pens to the emerging light beam. Next take your magnifying glass outside on a
sunny day and hold it just above the ground so you get a really bright spot on the
ground. Takes you right back to burning ants when you were a kid, huh? 3 By the
way, why is that spot so hot?
Take your magnifying glass, Figure 3.15
along with a sheet of white paper,
and find a lit lightbulb. Set things
up as in Figure 3.15 and move the
magnifying glass varying distances
from the paper until you get a clear
image of the lightbulb on the pa-
per. Cool, no? You can also do this
with a television set or computer
screen (in place of the lightbulb,
not the magnifying glass) in a dark-
ened room.
Now look through the mag-
nifying glass at a bunch of objects. Try holding it close to your eye and then
moving it out to arm’s length. Any change in what you see? Do objects appear
right side up or upside down? Does it matter whether you’re looking at nearby
objects or faraway objects?
If you don’t have a magnifying glass, fill
your glass of water all the way to the top, put
your hand over the top, and then hold it as
shown in Figure 3.16.
Do all of the things I asked you to do
with the magnifying glass. Of course, you
might want to do this over a sink if your hand
isn’t exactly doing a great job of keeping the
water in the glass. Also, you’ll have a tough
time forming an image of a lightbulb on a
piece of paper with the glass of water.

Figure 3.16

3
For the record, I’m not advocating the burning of ants! Let’s just say some of us were less than
angels back in the third grade.

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3C h a p te r
Even more science stuff
Light beams that travel
Figure 3.17
through a glass of water or
a magnifying glass do
some pretty serious refract-
ing. You probably got re-
sults something like those
in Figure 3.17.
We could figure out
why the light did what it
did by using a ray diagram and Snell’s law, but there’s an easier way to think
about what’s happening. Instead of picturing the light as a bunch of rays, let’s
picture it as a series of wave fronts coming towards the magnifying glass. I’ll
only have to explain the magnifying glass, because the glass of water works the
same way. Also, I’ll get a bit more general and talk about what light does when
it comes in contact with a lens, which is basically what a magnifying glass is. So
anyway, the wave-front diagram is shown in Figure 3.18.
Figure 3.18 Figure 3.19

Remember that light travels more slowly in glass than it does in air and
notice that the middle part of each wave front hits the lens before the other
parts of the wave front. Because the middle of the lens is thicker than the ends,
the middle of the wave will spend more time at a slower speed, and it will fall
behind the other parts of the wave. The result is that each wave front curves as
shown in Figure 3.19 and converges to a point on the other side of the lens.

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 Chapter 3
To get a feel for what Figure 3.20
each wave front is going
through, pretend you’re a
wave front by walking along
with your arms straight over
your head. Now make your
stomach “fall behind” your
arms and legs. Your body
now has the shape of a con-
verging wave front (Figure
3.20).
Back to the lens. The
point at which the incoming
wave fronts, which correspond to parallel light rays, converge is called the focal
point of the lens. When you used the magnifying glass to make a bright spot
using sunlight, that spot was the focal point of the magnifying glass, and the
distance between the glass and the spot was the focal length of the lens. A lens
that’s shaped like the one in Figure 3.18 is called a converging, or convex lens.
Now let’s look at what might Figure 3.21
happen with a different shaped
lens, in particular the one shown
in Figure 3.21. In this case, the cen-
ter of the wave front travels longer
in air, and therefore gets ahead of
the rest of the wave (your stom-
ach jumps ahead of your arms and
legs, which for many of us is sort
of the normal way of things any-
way!), and the wave front diverges
away from the lens. Not surpris-
ingly, this kind of lens is called a
diverging, or concave lens.
Convex and concave lenses are useful for all sorts of things, not the least of
which is for eyeglasses or contact lenses. I’ll address those useful things in Chapter
6. In the meantime, I promised I’d explain telescopes in the Applications sec-
tion, so we better get moving in that direction. To do that, I need to explain why
you saw things the way you did when looking through the magnifying glass or
the glass of water.
Again, I’m just going to use a basic convex lens to make things simple. What
applies to this lens also applies to the magnifying glass and approximately to the

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3C h a p te r
Figure 3.22 glass of water. Let’s start with
forming an image of a light bulb
on a sheet of paper. Figure 3.22
shows that setup.
I’ve drawn two light rays
that leave the top of the bulb.
One hits the lens as a parallel
ray, and as we now know, that
ray will refract and go through
the focal point of the lens.4 An-
other ray goes through the cen-
ter of the lens. That ray pretty
much passes straight on through
without refracting (you’re just
going to have to trust me on
that!). Notice that those two rays
intersect on the other side of the
lens where we’ve placed the paper. I’m not going to go into detail, but if you
trace every other ray that leaves the top of the light bulb and goes through the
lens, they will all end up at that intersection point on the paper. This means that
there will be an image of the top of the bulb at that point. If we follow that ray-
tracing process for all parts of the bulb, we’ll get the entire image of the bulb
that’s shown in Figure
Figure 3.23
3.22. Notice that the image
is upside down, as it is
when you actually do this.
It’s a short step to fig-
ure out what kind of im-
age you see when you look
at a faraway object while
holding the lens away
from your eye at least half
an arm’s length. All we do
is remove the sheet of pa-
per from Figure 3.22 so the
light rays can continue on
4
I just chose an arbitrary loca-
tion for the focal points in Fig-
ures 3.22 and 3.24, so don’t go
nuts trying to figure out why
they are where they are.

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 Chapter 3
after they intersect (Figure 3.23). When you see these rays, they look like they’re
coming from an image that’s where the paper used to be. So you see an upside-
down image of the bulb.5
Finally, here’s how a Figure 3.24
lens can magnify an im-
age when the image is
close to the lens. Figure
3.24 shows this situation
and it also shows the
same kind of rays I drew Figure 3.25
in Figure 3.22—one that
comes into the lens as a
parallel ray and refracts
through the focal point
and one that goes
through the center of the
lens and doesn’t refract.
This time the two
rays don’t intersect on
the other side of the
lens. They do, however,
appear to be coming
from the image shown
in Figure 3.25. The im-
age appears to be much
larger than the real ob-
ject, so we have a magni-
fication. Maybe that’s why they call them magnifying glasses!
That’s as far as I’m going to take you with lenses and such, as we’ve covered
the basics. If you pick up a physics text and find the chapter on geometrical
optics, you’ll see diagrams similar to those on the previous pages. You’ll also see
lots of equations that one can use to determine exactly the location and size of
images formed by lenses and mirrors. Suffice it to say that, if you plan on build-
ing a microscope or other optical instrument, you’d better use those equations.

5
If this isn’t making any sense, go back and review the material in Chapter 1 where I discuss how we see
images where the light appears to be coming from.

Stop Faking It: Light 55

3C h a p te r
Chapter Summary
l When sending and receiving electromagnetic waves (light, radio waves, mi-
crowaves), a parabolic reflector can direct waves to and from a focal point,
enhancing the reception or transmission.
l Lenses, used alone or in combinations, enable us to see images of objects
that are magnified, reduced, projected, or otherwise altered.
l Lenses that cause light waves to converge are called convex lenses, and lenses
that cause light waves to diverge are called concave lenses.
l To determine where a series of lenses and other optical instruments will
form an image, you trace what happens to the rays of light emitted by the
object being viewed.

Applications
1. Now we get to telescopes. Figure 3.26 shows two kinds of telescopes—a refract-
ing telescope and a reflecting telescope. Not surprisingly, the refracting tele-
scope uses two lenses while the reflecting telescope uses mirrors and a lens.

Figure 3.26

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First the refracting telescope. There are two main lenses. One is a really
large lens, known as the objective. The objective gathers light from distant
objects such as planets and stars and forms an image of them inside the
telescope. This works just like using a magnifying glass to look at distant
objects. The bigger the objective, the more light it can gather, and the better
the telescope. However, no matter what size the objective, the image it forms
is rather small. To get a larger image, there’s a second lens called the eye-
piece. This lens magnifies the image formed by the objective so you can
see it better. The eyepiece works just like using a magnifying glass to look at
something that’s close to the magnifying lens.
So telescopes are pretty simple. The larger they are, the more light they
can gather, and the better images you get. There’s a problem with refracting
telescopes, though. The larger the objective lens, the heavier it is, not to
mention being much more expensive to make. The lens can get so large it
sags under its own weight. To remedy that, we move to reflecting telescopes,
which use a large parabolic mirror in place of the objective lens. This mirror
gathers the light and sends it to a tiny mirror that’s at the focus of the
parabolic mirror. The image formed by this combination is once again pretty
small, so we need an eyepiece lens to magnify it. There are two nice things
about reflecting telescopes. First, large mirrors are cheaper to make than
large lenses. Second, the mirror is at the bottom of the reflecting telescope,
so you can support it underneath and keep it from sagging under its own
weight. This means you can make a much larger reflecting telescope than
you can a refracting tele-
scope. Most major tele- Figure 3.27
scopes these days, includ-
ing the Hubble Space
Telescope, are reflecting
telescopes.
2. Binoculars are nothing
but a couple of miniature
telescopes. They work
exactly the same as a re-
fracting telescope but
they use prisms to cause
the incoming light to un-
dergo total internal re-
flection in getting to the
eyepieces. (See Figure
3.27.) This redirection of
the light is necessary in

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3C h a p te r
order to get the light from very large objective lenses to the eyepieces, which
can’t be farther apart than our eyes!
3. Cameras operate basically like the pinhole camera you made but with lenses
added to get a brighter and sharper image. If the camera has a single lens,
you can’t zoom in and out and your picture taking is limited. If the camera
has two lenses, though, you can change the position between the two lenses
and change the size of the image the camera creates. In other words, mod-
ern cameras are telescopes with film added!

Topic: lenses
Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL08

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Chapter

Not-So-Cheap Sunglasses
f you browse through the sunglasses at your local department store, you’ll

I find that some of them are advertised as “polarized.” What is it that makes
a pair of polarized sunglasses so special, and are they really better at reduc-
ing glare, as advertised? To answer those questions, you have to understand what
polarized light is. Lucky for you, this chapter is all about polarized light!

Things to do before you read the science stuff

Find the three polarized filters that came with the kit. They’re the lightly
tinted pieces you can see through. Hold one up and look through it at various
things. Does it make anything look different? Try rotating the filter and see if
that does anything.

59
4C h a p t e r
Figure 4.1 Now hold two filters together so you’re looking
through both of them. Slowly rotate one of the filters
while keeping the second one stationary (Figure 4.1). You
should definitely see something happening now.
Arrange these two filters so no light gets through them.
What do you think will happen if you add a third filter to
these two? Go ahead and try it. Does rotating this third
filter change anything? Now you’re ready for a magic trick
(yippee!). With the first two filters set up so no light gets
through, slide the third filter in between the first two and
slowly rotate it. How in the world can adding a filter actu-
ally allow light to pass through? Shouldn’t more filters
result in more light being blocked? Evidently not!
Yet another Figure 4.2
magic trick. Use two
polarized filters and a sheet of plastic wrap
to make a sandwich. The filters should be
oriented so no light gets through, with the
plastic wrap in between. Now stretch the
plastic wrap as shown in Figure 4.2. Proof
positive that stretching is good for you,
because it makes you see the light. Okay,
bad joke.

The science stuff

Hearken back to Chapter 2, where I explained how we can model light as chang-
ing electric and magnetic fields traveling through space as waves. Figure 2.14 (p.
xx) is a drawing of that, and it gives the impression that the electric fields are
always up and down and the magnetic fields are always side to side. That’s not
the case with most of the light you run
into in everyday life. In fact, the electric Figure 4.3
and magnetic fields can be moving in any
direction, as long as it’s in the plane that’s
perpendicular to the direction of travel
of the light waves (Figure 4.3).
In general, any small bundle of light
waves will have electric and magnetic
fields that move in all of the directions
of that plane. We call this kind of light

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 Chapter 4
unpolarized light, and we can repre- Figure 4.4
sent it with a diagram like Figure 4.4.
To figure out what a polarized filter
does to unpolarized light, I’m going to use
an analogy of waves on a rope. Suppose you
have a rope that goes through a narrow
picket fence, as shown in Figure 4.5.1
Further suppose you want to send
waves along that rope so they make it past

Figure 4.5

the picket fence. If those waves are in

the same direction as the slots in the
picket fence, you’re in business. If they’re
perpendicular to the slots, the waves just
won’t make it through (Figure 4.6).
What about waves that are at a 45-
degree angle to the slots in the fence? It
Figure 4.6 might not be obvious, but what will make

1
For those Rocky and Bullwinkle fans out there, I’m reminded of the two guys sitting on a bench,
talking, when something really strange happens in the cartoon. One turns to the other and says,
“Now there’s somethin’ you don’t see everyday, Chauncy—a rope going through a picket fence.”

Stop Faking It: Light 61

4C h a p t e r
Figure 4.7 it through the fence is a portion of
the waves. You can think of the
waves at a 45-degree angle as hav-
ing a vertical component and a
horizontal component (Figure 4.7).
The vertical component gets
through, but the horizontal com-
ponent doesn’t. The result is that
part of the wave (the part that lines
up with the slots) makes it through
the fence.
Now let’s suppose you are the
fastest waves-on-a-rope maker in
the West. You can send a bunch of
waves along a rope, and change
their direction really fast so it looks like you’re simultaneously sending waves
that move in every direction in the plane that’s perpendicular to the direction
of travel of the waves, as seen in Figure 4.8.
When you try and send this mess Figure 4.8
through the fence, the fence will “se-
lect out” all of the waves that move
in the direction of the slots plus parts
of the waves that are not completely
perpendicular to the slots. The waves
that are completely perpendicular to
the slots won’t make it through at all.
On the other side of the fence, you Figure 4.9
end up with waves that are moving in
only one direction—the direction of
the slots (Figure 4.9).
Polarized filters do just about the
same thing to light that goes through
them. Unpolarized light has its electric
fields vibrating in all directions in the
plane that’s perpendicular to the direc-
tion of travel of the waves. The filter
“selects” out only those waves with en-
tire electric fields, or components of
electric fields, that vibrate in a particu-
lar direction. Exactly half of the unpo-

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 Chapter 4
larized light makes it Figure 4.10
through the filter, and
what does make it
through has its electric
field vibrating in only one
direction (Figure 4.10).
Any light with an electric
field vibrating in only one
direction is called polar-
ized light.
How does a polar-
ized filter perform this
magic? Just about the
same way that picket
fences perform this
magic on waves on a
rope. Polarized filters are
composed of long chain
molecules that are lined
up along a particular di-
rection, much like the
pickets in a picket fence.
These molecules com-
Figure 4.11
pletely absorb light that
has its electric fields
lined up with the mol-
ecules and they just rera-
diate (basically, let pass)
light that has its electric
fields perpendicular to
the molecules. This is like
the picket fence absorb-
ing waves that are lined
up with the slots, so the
analogy breaks down a
bit, but the final result is
the same (see Figure 4.11).
Let’s now look at
what happens when you
try and send rope waves
through two picket

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4C h a p t e r
Figure 4.12 fences. The trick is that these
two fences have their slots lined
up at right angles to each other
(Figure 4.12).
Obviously no waves are go-
ing to make it through both
fences. The first fence selects
out waves that are traveling up
and down, but those are pre-
cisely the waves that won’t
make it through the second
fence. The same thing happens
with two polarized filters.
When they’re set up so the
chain molecules in the separate
filters are at right angles, no light gets through. Of course, if the filters are set up
so the chain molecules in the separate filters are exactly lined up, lots of light
gets through. For angles in between, varying amounts of light get through both
filters. That’s why there’s a gradual change from light to dark when you slowly
rotate one of the filters.
Makes perfect sense, right? Well, what in the world is going on when you
have two filters at right angles letting no light through and then slip a third in
between, resulting in light getting through? To understand this, we look at two
filters at a time. The first filter and the middle filter are not at right angles, so
some light gets through this combination. The middle filter and the last filter
also are not at right angles, so some light gets through that combination. Check
out Figure 4.13.

Figure 4.13

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Finally, let’s figure out what’s going on with the plastic wrap sandwiched
between the two filters that are at right angles (no light getting through). When
you stretch the plastic wrap, all of a sudden light gets through. In other words,
the plastic wrap starts acting like a polarized filter. The reason for that is that by
stretching the plastic wrap, you actually do make it into a polarized filter. Plastic
wrap is composed of long chain molecules, but they’re not lined up like a picket
fence. When you stretch the plastic, you line those molecules up, and you end
up with a polarized filter.

More things to do before you read more science stuff

There’s really only one thing to do in this section, but it is definitely worth
doing. Put some clear corn syrup in a glass (half full is fine) and then tape one
of the polarized filters to the side of the glass. Then set up a flashlight so it
shines through the filter and then on through the corn syrup. Figure 4.14 ex-
plains it all.

Figure 4.14

Hold a second polarized filter in front of you as you look at the light emerging
from the corn syrup. Rotate the filter and see all the pretty colors! Rotate the
filter slowly and notice the progression of colors. Any special order in which
they appear?

More science stuff

Because the light from the flashlight passes through a polarized filter, the light
that goes through the corn syrup is polarized in a certain direction. Just as
when light goes through any kind of medium, this polarized light doesn’t just
pass on through the corn syrup. It’s absorbed and reradiated as it passes through.
Sugar molecules, such as dextrose and fructose (of which corn syrup is made),
rotate the direction of polarization of light in this absorption and reradiation

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4C h a p t e r
process. And just as different frequencies of light refract different amounts in
most mediums, different frequencies of light have their directions of polariza-
tion rotated different amounts when they travel through sugar molecules. So
let’s say red light rotates the amount shown in Figure 4.15, and blue light rotates
the amount shown in Figure 4.16.

Figure 4.15 Figure 4.16

What happens when you look at this emerging light through a second polarized
filter and slowly rotate that filter? You will see the red light at one angle and blue
light at another. And of course you’ll see all the other colors in between.

Chapter Summary
l Unpolarized light is light that has electric fields vibrating in all directions in
a plane perpendicular to the direction the light travels.
l Polarized light is light that has electric fields vibrating in a single direction.
l Certain materials can create polarized light from unpolarized light, stop
light with a given polarization direction from passing, or rotate the direc-
tion in which light is polarized.

Applications
1. Okay, what about those polarized sunglasses? What’s special about them?
Well, they’re supposed to reduce glare and they do. Reflected light, as in
light from the Sun hitting the car in front of you and shining in your eyes,
tends to be polarized in a direction that’s parallel to the surface from which

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 Chapter 4
it’s reflecting.2 If you have sunglasses that are polarized perpendicular to
that direction, those sunglasses will absorb much of the reflected light. Hence,
they reduce glare.
2. Speaking of sunglasses, why is it that car windshields look all blotchy when
you have polarized sunglasses on? This relates back to the plastic wrap. Wind-
shields, and other glass, tend to have stress points, where the molecules of
the glass are stretched to the point where they act like polarizing filters. By
looking at that glass through another polarizing filter (the sunglasses), you
see areas where the two filters do and don’t line up.
3. Remember why the sky is blue? It has to do with how the tiny molecules in
the upper atmosphere scatter sunlight. Turns out that during that scattering
process, the emerging blue light tends to be polarized more in one direction
than others. To see this, go out on a sunny day and look at the sky (with the
Sun off to your left or right) through one of the polarized filters. Rotate the
filter and see that the blue light coming at you is polarized.
4. Oh boy, another field trip to the local rock shop! Ask to see a sample of
calcite. Hold the piece of calcite over some print and rotate it. You’ll see a
double image in certain orientations. That’s because calcite has a different
index of refraction (check Chapter 1 if you don’t remember what an index
of refraction is) for light that is polarized in different directions. Now, just as
we can think of light that is polarized at a 45-degree angle as having a vertical
and a horizontal component (see Figure 4.7), we can also represent unpolar-
ized light as being a combination of vertically and horizontally polarized
light. The calcite takes the unpolarized light coming off the print and splits
it into two images because the different polarizations (vertical and horizon-
tal components) refract different amounts.

2
To be exact, the reflected light is elliptically polarized, but that whole idea would take another page
to explain, and you probably don’t care anyway!

Stop Faking It: Light 67

 5
Chapter

When Light Waves

Collide
I told you way back in Chapter 1 that light doesn’t always travel in straight
lines. It can bend around corners, just like sound. When it does change
direction like this, you end up with light waves that originated from differ-
ent places coming together at one spot. This can lead to some really cool effects
and pretty colors. You saw those colors when you looked through the diffrac-
tion grating that came with the book. You get to find out how that thing works
in this chapter.

69
5 Chapter
Things to do before you read the science stuff
What better way to start learning more about light than by messing around with
sound? That might seem silly, but because we can model both light and sound as
waves, they behave very much alike. Plus, you’d need a laser to do with light
what you’re about to do with sound, and I’m betting most of you don’t have a
laser in the attic. If you do happen to have a laser, I’ll tell you later how to use it
to do the following demonstration.
So on to what you have to do. Set up your home sound system or a boom
box so two of the speakers are right next to each other and facing the same
direction (you do need two speakers for this, so a regular radio won’t work).
Place the speakers so you can be about 3 meters away from them with your ears
at the level of the speakers. You’ll have to get down on hands and knees if the
speakers are on the floor (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 Do whatever you
must to pick up AM ra-
dio signals. If you have
a mono/stereo button
on your sound system,
set it for mono. Now
tune the receiver so
you’re in between sta-
tions and picking up
that really annoying
weeeeooooo sort of high-
pitched hum that you
would normally try to
avoid. This annoying hum is easier to find with a dial tuner than with a push-
button digital tuner. If all you have is the latter, just do the best you can to find
a constant pitch hum with as little static, talking, or music as possible.
With one ear fac- Figure 5.2
ing t he speakers,
move your head
slowly back and forth
in the direction
shown in Figure 5.2.
Concentrate on the
annoying hum as
you do this and no-
tice any change in

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volume. Is there also an overall pattern to the changes in volume? Are you
getting coded messages from outer space?
Time for some serious science experimentation. Scrounge around the kids’
rooms for some bubble blowing solution, go outside on a sunny day, and blow
some bubbles. Watch the bubbles carefully as they float around. In addition to
seeing reflections in the bubbles (which you could explain using ray diagrams,
right?), you can also see lots of swirling colors. What’s causing those? While
you’re at it, think about the last time you saw a thin film of oil on water (the
street after a rain is a good place to see this—the oil is from the cars and the
water is from, um, the sky). What causes the colors you see in this oil film?

The science stuff

Suppose you and a friend hold opposite ends of a rope and send wave pulses
toward the middle of the rope. When those pulses meet, they’re each telling the
rope to do something (go up, go down, or stay still). Being an innocent by-
stander in this process, the rope does what both pulses tell it to do. If each pulse
says “go up,” then the rope rises twice as high as it would with just one pulse. If
each pulse says, “go down,” then the rope goes down twice as much. If one
pulse says to go up and the other says to go down, those instructions cancel each
other, and the rope does nothing (Figure 5.3).
Light waves and sound waves do the same kind of thing. If waves from two
separate sources hit a spot “in phase,” meaning up-and-down motions are in

Figure 5.3

Stop Faking It: Light 71

5 Chapter
Figure 5.4 sync, then the total effect at that spot is twice what it would
normally be (Figure 5.4).
If the two sources are “out of phase,” meaning their
up-and-down motions are totally out of sync, then the two
waves cancel each other and you get nothing (Figure 5.5).
This process of completely adding, completely cancel-
ing, or something in between, is known as interference.
When two or more waves combine to produce a greater
result than the individual waves, that’s called construc-
tive interference, and when two or more waves com-
bine to produce a lesser result (they cancel one another)
than the individual
waves, that’s called de- Figure 5.6
structive interfer-
ence.
Let’s apply this idea
to the sound waves com-
ing from the two speak-
ers. Figure 5.6 shows
Figure 5.5
that the waves coming
from each speaker usu-
ally travel different dis-
tances in getting to a
given place.
In traveling differ-
ent distances, the two
sets of waves can get
“out of step” with each
other. We can think of
this process as one wave
shifting with respect to
the other. If the total
amount of shift is a
wavelength, or multiples
of a wavelength, the two
sets of waves will still be in sync (in phase),
and they’ll interfere constructively. This gives
you a loud spot. If the total amount of shift
is a half a wavelength, or odd multiples of
half a wavelength, the two sets of waves will

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be totally out of sync (out of phase), and they’ll interfere destructively. This gives
you a quiet spot (Figure 5.7).
Figure 5.7

Overall, you end up with a pattern of loud-soft-loud-soft-loud-soft as you

move around the speakers, as shown in Figure 5.8. This is due to the sound waves
from the separate speakers getting in and out of phase because they travel differ-
ent distances to get to you.
Figure 5.8
As I said, light does the same thing. How-
ever, setting up this demonstration with light is
trickier, mainly because light has such a short
wavelength. The way you do it is to shine a la-
ser at two very tiny, closely spaced slits. These
two slits act like two separate sources of light
(like the two speakers), and they will produce a
series of light and dark spots on a screen held
in front of the slits (Figure 5.9).

Figure 5.9
I could take this a bit further
and develop a mathematical re-
lationship that will tell exactly
where the light and dark spots
will be (at what angle from the
two slits) for a given wavelength
of incoming light and a given
separation of the slits. If I did
that, though, then I’d be follow-
ing the usual high school and
college textbook route, and this

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5 Chapter
isn’t a textbook! Besides, a whole bunch of math and geometry right now might
make you put down this book and never pick it up again.
Let’s move on to oil films and soap bubbles. Exactly the same kind of pro-
cess is going on with both of them, so I’ll only explain the oil film. When light
hits a thin oil film, it reflects from the front surface and also the back surface.1
Now suppose you have light of a single wavelength (one color) hitting this film.
Figure 5.10 shows what happens to this light when it hits the film at two differ-
ent angles. Notice that in each case, the light that reflects off the back of the
film travels farther than the light that reflects off the front of the film. This sets
up the possibility that the two sets of reflected waves could shift in relation to
each other, and possibly get out of phase. If the extra distance traveled causes
those two waves to get out of sync by a half wavelength, they will interfere
destructively, and you won’t see any light at all. If the extra distance traveled
causes the waves to be back in phase when they emerge, you’ll see a bright spot.

Figure 5.10

To be more realistic, consider what will happen when white light, contain-
ing all colors, hits our oil film. We still have the same situation, with one
crucial difference. Because the different colors of light have different wave-
lengths, the extra distance traveled will get them in or out of phase by differ-
ent amounts. So if the angle is just right to cause red light to interfere destruc-
tively, other wavelengths of light won’t interfere destructively. The result is that

1
This is just like the situation that makes double pane windows create double images, only on a
much smaller scale. I discussed that in the Applications section of Chapter 1.

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you remove red from the white light and Figure 5.11
you see a greenish blue color. Viewing this
oil film from different angles will result
in colors other than red interfering de-
structively, and you’ll see different col-
ors. Put it all together and you get a rain-
bow of colors (Figure 5.11).
Soap bubbles work just about the
same, with the soap film replacing the oil
film in the explanation. In both instances,
different thicknesses of the films also fig-
ure into what colors you see where, but
I’ll leave that analysis as a homework as-
signment!

More things to do before you read more science stuff

Set up your lamp with the long, tube-shaped bulb that I asked you to get in
Chapter 3. You didn’t really have to go out and buy this bulb in Chapter 3 but
now you have to. So there. Get two index cards, hold them right in front of your
face, and bring them together so you are looking at the bulb through a really
narrow slit (Figure 5.12).
Experiment with the size of the slit until you see something really interest-
ing, such as a whole bunch of vertical lines of dark and light. What happens to
the spacing between these lines as you change the width of the slit?
To get an even better view of those vertical lines, get a fork from the kitchen.
Hold it as shown in Figure 5.13 and slowly rotate it so when you look through the
tines of the fork, you are essentially looking through slits of different widths.
Figure 5.12 Figure 5.13

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5 Chapter
With a little care, you can rotate the fork slowly enough that you see a very
gradual change in the pattern of lines.
Notice any colors in the pattern? You should. How in the world can a fork
create rainbows? I thought you needed a prism for that!
Get your Rainbow Peephole (a diffraction grating) and look at the bulb through
this. There are rainbows all over the place, but concentrate on the pattern of
rainbows that stretch out directly to the right and left. See any similarity between
this pattern and the pattern of lines created with the fork? This is a tough com-
parison, because the fork patterns are really close together, while the diffraction
grating patterns are really spread out.
Finally, tape an empty toilet paper tube Figure 5.14
to the end of a flashlight and then poke a
pinhole in a sheet of construction paper.
Set all of this up as in Figure 5.14, so the
light from the flashlight goes through the
pinhole and shines onto a wall.
Take a close look at the pattern created
on the wall. Any similarity between this pat-
tern and what you get with a narrow slit?

More science stuff

In what follows, I’m going to talk about
what made those patterns you observed as light went through a narrow slit. The
explanation is going to involve the light spreading out as it travels through the
slit, as in Figure 5.15.2
Why does the light spread Figure 5.15
out, though? Why doesn’t the
light just travel straight on

2
Notice that Figure 5.15 only shows the
light spreading out horizontally and
not vertically. For reasons I won’t go
into here, light spreads out signifi-
cantly only when the size of the open-
ing is close to the wavelength of the
incoming light. Because we’ve ar-
ranged things so the vertical dimen-
sion of the slit is much larger than a
wavelength of light, there’s very little
spreading in that direction.

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through, as in Figure 5.16? After all, Figure 5.16
that’s what you’d expect if light
traveled in straight lines.
The key to what’s going on
here lies in the edges of the nar-
row slit. Remember that light
doesn’t just pass by or through
things but rather is always being
absorbed and reradiated. The light
at the edge of the slit is absorbed
by whatever material the slit is
made of and then reradiated. It’s as if the light at that point is a whole new
source of light (which it is!). In fact, it’s accurate to picture the light emerging
from the slit as coming from many, many point sources of light.
Okay, so the light spreads out when it
Figure 5.17 passes through the slit (Figure 5.17). To
see what this means in terms of creating
lots of dark and light lines, consider what
happens when light from one side of the
slit meets up with light from the other
side of the slit at a point on a distant
screen.
As Figure 5.18 shows, waves from these
two sources of light travel different dis-
tances to get to the point on the screen.
That means they can get out of sync, and
Figure 5.18

either constructively or destructively in-

terfere with each other. In other words,
we have the same situation as we had with
two point sources of light interfering with
each other. That means we’re going to get
a pattern of light and dark regions. Well,
the situation isn’t exactly like two point
sources. We have lots of point sources (in-
finitely many, in fact)! I won’t go into the
math, because it involves calculus, but the
overall result of the interference of all

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5 Chapter
these infinitely small sources of light is a pattern that’s a lot like what you get
from two point sources. What you have to do is add up all the shifts in wave-
length from the infinite number of point sources of light and see what you get
in terms of constructive or destructive interference. Sounds complicated but it’s
not if you understand the basics of calculus3.
When you get a pattern of light and dark lines by sending light through a
single slit, it’s called diffraction. I’m sure there’s a historical reason for mak-
ing a distinction between interference and diffraction, but you should know
that they are exactly the same thing. You have different sources of light interfering
constructively and destructively to produce various patterns. When you have
two or three or five sources of light, physicists call it interference. When you
have a whole bunch of sources of light, physicists call it diffraction. So if you
have to take a physics test before passing through the Pearly Gates, and one of
the questions is “What’s the difference between interference and diffraction?”
the correct answer is “nothing.” You might still get it marked wrong, but at least
you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re right.
Before getting to the colors in the patterns, we can take care of the pinhole
image without much trouble. Because the pinhole is circular, it produces a pat-
tern of light and dark lines that is circular. It’s the same old diffraction, but in
two dimensions instead of one. In this case, there is spreading in all directions
because the diameter of the pinhole is relatively close to the wavelength of the
incoming light (see Footnote 2, page 76).
Okay, what about those col-
Figure 5.19 ors? Well, it’s a lot like the in-
terference that happens with
an oil or soap film. Remember
that each color of light has a
different wavelength. For a
given path difference, some
colors (wavelengths) will inter-
fere constructively and some
will interfere destructively. So
as you move along the path
shown in Figure 5.19, you will
encounter spots where differ-
ent colors are bright, leading
to those nice little rainbows.

3
Calculus, and math in general, is another one of those subjects that sends people running for
cover. Just like science, though, it really isn’t that difficult to understand conceptually. It just
looks intimidating.

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And now the moment
Figure 5.20
you’ve been waiting for.
I’m going to explain how
your diffraction grating
works. A diffraction grat-
ing is basically plastic or
glass with lots of nar-
rowly spaced lines etched
in it. When light hits a
diffraction grating, it’s as
if the light is going
through thousands of
narrow slits. Light waves
from all these slits inter-
fere with one another,
creating a series of bright
and dark regions.
Each of these bright and dark regions is separated into different colors, for
exactly the reasons described for a single slit. So you will notice a series of
rainbows spreading out from the center, each a bit fainter than the one before
it. Clearly, though, your Rainbow Peephole doesn’t exactly correspond to Figure
5.20. That’s because the Rainbow Peephole is really two diffraction gratings placed
at right angles. This arrangement leads to patterns that scatter off along four
different lines.

Chapter Summary
l When separate light waves arrive at a given spot, those waves can add con-
structively (add to each other to create a larger wave), add destructively (can-
cel each other), or produce a result somewhere in between those two ex-
tremes. All kinds of wave addition are known as interference.
l Interference using a relatively small number of sources of light is simply
termed interference. Interference using a large number of sources of light is
usually termed diffraction.
l Interference and diffraction cause white light to separate into its compo-
nent colors, thus having an effect similar to that of sending light through a
prism.

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5 Chapter
Applications
1. Does anything ever cast a Figure 5.21
clean, sharp shadow? If light
travels in straight lines,
that’s what you’d expect.
That’s not what happens,
though. The reason is that
light doesn’t behave like a
simple ray model and travel
in straight lines. Because
light interacts with the edge
of the object creating the
shadow, there is a bit of dif-
fraction taking place, and
the edge of the shadow is a
bit fuzzy. If you have a carefully controlled shadow setup, you can look
closely and see that the fuzzy area of the shadow is actually composed of a
series of light and dark lines, as shown in Figure 5.21. Hmmmmm. Wonder
what causes those?
2. Ever wonder why your CD collection produces rainbows when light shines
on the CDs? It’s basically an interference effect. A CD is etched in a certain
way so that a laser reflecting off of it reproduces the pattern contained in
the music. The etches in the CD are close together, much like a diffraction
grating. When light reflects off these etches, it’s just as if the light is coming
from many tiny light sources. This leads to the same kind of pattern (rain-
bows!) you get with a diffraction grating. In fact, you would call a CD a
reflection grating.
3. When there’s a full moon and a light cloud cover, you will sometimes see
colored rings around the moon. Why? Interference as the moonlight passes
through the tiny water droplets that compose clouds.
4. Holograms are special pictures that produce a realistic 3-D effect. When you
move your head, you can actually see different sides of the object in a holo-
gram. Try that with a regular picture! The creation of holograms relies on
the interference of light that reflects off different parts of an object. For
example, suppose we’re taking a picture of your face. Light that travels from
a light source, to your nose, and then to a camera, travels a different distance
than light that travels from the source, to your cheek, and then to a camera.
These different distances mean that the two different reflected light waves
are probably out of sync when they hit the camera. Exactly how much they’re

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out of sync is a clue to how far your cheek is from your nose. In order to
make holograms, you have to have a very special setup that preserves the
“phase relationship” between different light waves. I won’t go into that, but
you should know that the basic principle of holograms is just plain ol’ inter-
ference of light waves.
5. In the desert of New Mexico, there’s a huge collection of radio telescopes
known as the Very Large Array. Put that name into an Internet search en-
gine for a picture of the array. This large grid of telescopes works a lot like a
diffraction grating in reverse. It’s “reverse” because instead of sending out
electromagnetic waves, this collection receives electromagnetic waves. By using
the interference effect of the radio waves that hit all the different telescopes,
it’s possible for this array to focus in on signals coming from a very tiny part
of the sky. They simply set up the array so that all signals except the ones in
that tiny part of the sky interfere destructively, and the ones from that part
of the sky interfere constructively.

Topic: interference
Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL09
Topic: diffraction
Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL10

Stop Faking It: Light 81

 6
Chapter

All About Eyeballs

his chapter is, as the title indicates, all about eyeballs and how they work.

T We’ll use just about everything we’ve learned so far, plus one or two new
things, including how to draw 3-D pictures.

Things to do before you read the science stuff

I’m going to ask you to do a number of little projects, one right after the other.
They all have to do with how your eyes work, but you might not see how until I
tie them all together in the next section. In the meantime, get started!

83
6C h a p t e r
Close your eyes and very gently touch the top part of your eyeball (through
the eyelid) where the eyeball meets the bone just above your eye. Push gently
with your finger. You should “see” an image at the bottom of your eye. Repeat
this at the bottom of your eyeball and you’ll ‘see” an image at the top of your
eye. Odd, no?
Grab a flashlight and head to the bathroom mirror. Look closely at your
eyes in the mirror. As you do this, shine the flashlight toward one of your eyes.
Then repeatedly turn the flashlight on and off. What happens to your eyes as
you do this?
Take a red and a blue object (the red and blue filters are fine) into a dimly lit
room. A closet with the door just barely open should work. Make sure you are
able to see everything around you, just not very well. Look at the red and blue
objects in this dimly lit room. Which do you see better? Now take them out into
a bright room. Which one seems brighter now?
You need a friend for
Figure 6.1
this next part. Gather to-
gether several different col-
ors of paper and give them
to the friend. Sit and stare
straight ahead while your
friend slowly brings one
color of paper from behind
your head to where you can
just see the paper out of
your peripheral (side) vi-
sion. Don’t move your eyes
to look at it!
Stop your friend as
soon as you can see the pa-
per. Try to identify the
color of the paper. Do this
a bunch of times with dif-
ferent colored paper and see how good you are at identifying colors with your
peripheral vision (Figure 6.1).
Get a red object and a sheet of white paper (no lines). Any old red object will
do, as long as it’s not bigger than the sheet of paper. Put the red object on the
paper and then stare at the object for at least 30 seconds. If you can handle a
minute, that’s even better. Now remove the red object and stare for a while at
the white paper. After a while, an image of the object should appear. What color
is it? Repeat this using a green object and an orange object.

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Figure 6.2 shows two xs. Hold this book about 30 centimeters (a foot) from
your face, cover your left eye, and stare at the x on the left with your right eye.
Figure 6.2

X X
Move the book slowly toward and away from you. At one point, the x on the
right should disappear. Repeat this, covering your right eye and staring at the x
on the right with your left eye.

The science stuff Figure 6.3

Figure 6.3 shows a diagram of
what a cross section of your eye
looks like.
The cornea and the lens
combine to focus light on the
back of the eye, on what is
known as the retina. This is just
the same kind of thing any old
convex lens would do to light,
meaning that it creates an up-
side-down image on the back
of your eye. Also, something in
the bottom of your field of view
shows up as an image on the Figure 6.4
top part of the back of your eye
(Figure 6.4).
When you gen-
tly push on the top
of your eye, you
“see” something in
the bottom of your
field of view. This is
because you have
stimulated the top of
the back of your eye, and your brain therefore thinks it’s seeing something
down low. So obviously, your brain seems to know that whatever image hits the
back of the eye is upside down!
Another cool thing about the lens is that your eye has muscles that can
actually change the shape of the lens. This changes the focal length of the lens

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6C h a p t e r
and helps you focus on objects that are different distances
from you.
When you shone a flashlight in one of your eyes, you
Topic: the eye saw your iris expand and contract. That’s because little
muscles in your eye react to the amount of light coming in
Go to: www.sciLINKS.org and adjust the opening accordingly. Too much light makes
Code: SFL11 it really difficult to see things, so when you shine light in
your eyes, the opening gets smaller. When you go to the
optometrist and get your eyes dilated, they paralyze these tiny muscles in the
eye so your iris stays wide open. Unfortunately, the muscles that control the
focusing power of the lens also get paralyzed. You end up with a double whammy—
too much light getting in and no ability to focus—that makes it really difficult to
drive home!
Figure 6.3 shows something called the fovea in the center of the retina on the
back of your eye. The fovea contains lots of little light receptors called cones.
Surrounding the fovea are other kinds of light receptors called rods. Rods and
cones both react when light waves hit them but they react in different ways.
First, rods are more active in dim light and cones are more active in bright light.
Rods are also more sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum, while cones are
more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum This explains what happened
when you looked at red and blue objects in a dimly lit room and then in a bright
room. In the dimly lit room, the rods take over and you are able to see the blue
object better. The red object might even appear black. In the bright room, the
cones are the primary receptors, and you see both objects equally well, or possi-
bly the red one seems a bit brighter than the blue one.
Now even though the rods do detect color, they don’t do it very well. And
notice that because the rods are on the edge of the fovea, they are the receptors
we use in peripheral vision.1 So when you use your peripheral vision, you can’t
make out colors very well. Interestingly, though, your peripheral vision can de-
tect motion quite well, so even if you don’t know whether it’s black or brown,
you can tell that some kind of bear is sneaking up on you!
The exact mechanism of how rods and cones perceive color isn’t all that well
understood, but we do know that there are pigments (the primary one is called
visual purple) that respond differently to different frequencies of light. We also
know that you can “overload” your eye’s response to certain frequencies. When
you stared at the red object and then at a blank sheet of paper, you saw a green
image of the object. That’s because your eyes became desensitized to the fre-

1
Remember how lenses form images. An image in your peripheral vision will form on the edge of
the retina, where the rods are, rather than the center, where the cones are.

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quencies of red light, effectively removing that color from your detection system
for a while. Of course, the ability to overload your eye receptors isn’t always a
bad thing, as I’ll explain in the Applications section.
Finally, what’s going on with the blind spot in your eye? How is it possible
to make one of the xs on the page disappear? Well, there’s one spot on your eye
where there are no rods or cones. It’s the place where the nerves that lead from
the rods and cones exit the eyeball on their way to the brain, and they are
collectively known as the optic nerve. The trick with the disappearing x just
amounts to arranging things so the image of the x falls right on the optic nerve,
exactly where you don’t have any receptors to detect the image.

More things to do before you read more science stuff

I promised 3-D pictures, and Figure 6.5
that’s what you’ll get. Get a
clean white sheet of paper (no
lines), a red pencil, a blue pen-
cil, and the red and blue fil-
ters. Start by drawing a blue
square on the sheet of paper.
Don’t press hard in this or any
other step of what I’m going
to have you draw. Using the
red pencil (don’t press hard!),
draw an identical square that is shifted just
slightly to the left of the blue square (Figure
6.5). The red and blue lines should overlap on
the top and bottom. The more you can make
these two squares
the exact same Figure 6.6
size and shape,
the better.
Now draw an-
other blue square
that slightly over-
laps the first two
squares (Figure
6.6).

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6C h a p t e r
Overlap the new blue square exactly with the red pencil (Figure 6.7).
Figure 6.7

Overlap this square with a third blue square (Figure 6.8).

Figure 6.8

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Now draw a red square identical to this last blue square, but shifted slightly to
the right (Figure 6.9).

Figure 6.9

Okay, time for the 3-D effect. Place the blue filter over your right eye and
the red filter over the left eye, and look at your squares in bright light. You
should see them as being different distances from you. The longer you stare at
them, the better the effect becomes. Just for kicks, place the red filter over your
right eye and the blue filter over your left eye. See any difference?
If you just came for the 3-D drawings and don’t care what caused them, skip
the rest of this section. If you want to understand what’s going on, then you
really better do the next couple of things.
Close one eye and walk around trying to pick up various objects. Easy or
difficult compared to using two eyes?
Hold your finger right in front of your eyes and look at it first with one eye
closed and then with the other eye closed. Notice the apparent shift in position
of your finger as you do this. Now repeat with your finger at arm’s length from
your eyes. How does the amount of shift compare with when your finger was
close to your eyes? Repeat this with all sorts of nearby and faraway objects. See
a correlation between how far away something is and how much shift there is
between the left and right eye images? See how people stare at you if you go
around doing this in public?

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6C h a p t e r
More science stuff
We use a number of cues to determine how far away something is, but one of
the primary ones is through the different images our two eyes see. Somehow
our brain compares the image from each eye, determines the amount of shift in
the images, and assigns a distance based on that shift. If the difference in shift is
a lot, the object is close by. If the difference in shift is very little, the object is far
away. Check out Figure 6.10.

Figure 6.10

This explains why it’s a little tricky picking up objects when you have one
eye closed. There’s no comparison to go by, and it’s difficult to tell how far away
the object is. This also explains the 3-D squares you drew. Basically, you are
creating an artificial amount of shift to fool your eyes into seeing depth where
there is none. Here’s how it works. When you have a blue filter over your right
eye and a red filter over your left eye, your right eye sees only the red lines and
your left eye sees only the blue lines. Check back to Chapter 2, Application 1, for
an explanation of that.
When the blue and red squares overlap exactly, there’s just the normal shift
between your left and right eye images for something that’s on that piece of
paper. You see one square. When the blue square is shifted to the right relative
to the red square, your left eye sees a square that’s shifted more than normal to
the right and your right eye sees a square that’s shifted more than normal to the
left. Your brain assumes your left and right eyes are looking at a single square.
Because there’s lots of shift between the two images, your brain decides this
square is closer to you than the sheet of paper (see Figure 6.11).
When the blue square is shifted to the left relative to the red square, your
left eye sees a square that’s shifted less than normal to the right and your right

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Figure 6.11

eye sees a square that’s shifted less than normal to the left. Again your brain
assumes your left and right eyes are looking at a single square. Because there’s
very little shift between the two images, your brain decides this square is farther
away than the sheet of paper (Figure 6.12).
If you’ve been to a 3-D movie lately, chances are you looked at the screen
not with red and blue glasses, but what seem like an ordinary pair of sun-

Figure 6.12

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6C h a p t e r
glasses. Well, those aren’t ordinary sunglasses. They’re polarized sunglasses,
with one lens polarized in one direction and the other lens polarized in the
other direction. The movie itself is shown with two projectors. The two pro-
jectors are in sync, but they project images that are polarized in different
directions. In this way, your right eye sees one set of images and your left eye
sees another set of images. By creating artificial shifts in these images, the
polarization creates a 3-D effect. So it’s exactly the same process as using
blue and red filters.

Chapter Summary
l The combination of cornea and lens in the eye act as a convex lens to focus
images on the back part of the eyeball.
l The retina on the back of the eyeball contains light sensitive rods and cones
that detect images and send appropriate information about the images to
the brain.
l Rods and cones are sensitive to different frequency ranges and different
strengths of light.
l We perceive distance, in part, by comparing the shift in an object’s apparent
position when viewed through the left and right eyes.
l We can create 3-D drawings and movies by causing the left and right eyes to
see separate images and using those Figure 6.13
separate images to alter the amount
of shift the brain perceives between
the left and right eye images.

Applications
1. When you’re nearsighted, your lens
and cornea combination focus light
more strongly than necessary, creat-
ing an image in front of your retina.
When you’re farsighted, your lens
and cornea combination focus light
less strongly than necessary, creating
an image behind your retina (Figure
6.13).
To correct this, you use either a
diverging lens (for nearsightedness)

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or a converging lens (for farsightedness) Figure 6.14
to get the image where it’s supposed to
be (Figure 6.14).
Of course, there’s an easier way. Just
change the shape of the cornea so it fo-
cuses light where it’s supposed to. That’s
what LASIK surgery is all about.
2. Ever wonder why you can’t see very well
under water? Well, in order for your eyes
to focus properly, incoming light has to
refract when it goes through the combi-
nation of cornea and lens. This refrac-
tion depends on the fact that the light is
coming from air, with a low index of re-
fraction, to the cornea, with a high in-
dex of refraction. Underwater, however,
the incoming light goes from water to
your cornea instead of from air to your
cornea. Water has an index of refraction similar to that of your cornea, so
the light doesn’t refract very much. This means images don’t focus where
they’re supposed to.
3. I told you that the fact you can overload your rods and cones is not all bad.
That overloading leads to persistence of vision—the fact that you can see im-
ages for a short time after the original object is no longer there. Movie
projectors present a whole bunch of still pictures at a rapid rate. This rate is
fast enough that a new still picture appears before the image from the one
before it fades. The result is that you see continuous motion rather than a
series of still pictures.
Televisions and computer monitors use this same technique. Electron
guns (!) sweep across the screen rapidly, creating the images you see. Before
the image from the top of the screen can fade, the electron guns are back for
a return trip that refreshes the image. Some computer monitors cheat on
this effect. They don’t refresh the entire screen each trip, but rather do only
half the screen in each trip. This is called interlacing and results in a slight
flickering of the screen image. If you don’t want that flickering, make sure
you buy a “noninterlacing” monitor.
4. Ever see little “floaters” in your field of vision? They’re pretty easy to see if
you go outside and stare at the sky (not directly at the Sun!). These little
floaters go across your field of vision slowly, and move a bit if you blink.

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6C h a p t e r
Figure 6.15 Watch them closely and you’ll notice little rings
around them.
Floaters are actually tiny particles that are in
the vitreous humor on the inside of your eye. When
light passes by them, they cause the light to dif-
fract, creating the familiar pattern of light and dark
lines (refer to Chapter 5). So basically, you’re look-
ing inside your eyeball when you see these little
guys!

Topic: LASIK
Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL12

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 7
Chapter

Fire the Photon Torpe-

does, Mr. Sulu!

Y eah, what about those photon torpedoes? Aren’t photons supposed to be

little light particles? Yes, they are, and they constitute the third model for
what light is. Much of the photon stuff is beyond the scope of this book,
but I can give you at least some idea of what photons are and maybe also some
idea of what those electrons are actually doing when they emit visible light.

Things to do before you read the science stuff

This is the easiest “things to do” section in the whole book. All you have to do is
make a list of all the things you can think of that produce light. Make sure you

95
7 Chapter
only include things that produce their own light rather than reflect light from
somewhere else. For example, the Sun produces its own light, but the Moon
doesn’t. We only see the Moon because of reflected sunlight. Glow-in-the-dark
things should be included because, even though you have to charge them up by
exposing them to another source of light, they produce their own light after that.
When you’re done with your list, think of what all these things have in
common, if anything. Well yeah, duh, they all produce light, but is there any-
thing else they have in common?

Figure 7.1
The science stuff
The current view of atoms
is that the electrons in the
atoms have a bunch of “en-
ergy levels” at which they
can hang out. Some of
those energy levels are oc-
cupied and some aren’t.
It’s a bit like Figure 7.1,
with each place higher up
on the cliff corresponding to a higher energy level. There are all sorts of rules
for how many electrons can be at each energy level and whether or not electrons
are allowed to jump from one energy level to another.
There’s a tendency for all atoms to have their electrons in the lowest en-
ergy condition possible. That means that if there’s an opening in one of the
lower energy levels, and the
jump is allowed, an electron
from a higher energy level
Figure 7.2
will jump down to the lower
energy level. As the electron
jumps, it emits an electro-
magnetic wave. If the fre-
quency of the emitted wave
is in the visible range, then
the electron has emitted
light (Figure 7.2).
So, it’s as simple as that.
When an electron jumps
from a higher energy level
to a lower energy level, we

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get light. Of course, we don’t have a very good picture of what the electrons
are actually, physically doing. We know what they aren’t doing, though. They’re
not jumping from shelf to shelf on a cliff, they’re not buzzing around in
circles, and they’re not jiggling up and down.1 For our purposes, though, “jump-
ing from shelf to shelf” is a good enough analogy.
Now we know how to make an atom emit light. We cause its electrons to
jump up to higher energy levels, leaving lower ones vacant. Then electrons jump
down to these vacant levels, and emit light when they do. The way you cause
electrons to jump to higher energy levels is to add energy to the atoms.2 In a
lightbulb, you run an electrical current through the filament. This excites the
atoms (yes, that’s the actual terminology scientists use—and you thought science
wasn’t sexy!), sending lots of electrons to higher energy states. When those elec-
trons jump back down to lower levels they give us light.
Other sources of light use different kinds of energy to make them emit
light. The Sun uses nuclear reactions. A match uses a chemical reaction known
as oxidation to produce light. Glow sticks also use a chemical reaction. You have
to snap a glow stick to get it to glow. When you snap it, two different chemicals
inside the stick mix together. In the mixing process, new, lower energy levels for
electrons are created. When the electrons jump to these lower levels, they emit
light. I’ll explain fluorescent lights and glow-in-the dark stickers in the Applica-
tions section.

More things to do before you read more science stuff

This next activity is one you have to do at night; you’ll need a streetlight or a
neon sign, so if you don’t have those things around the house, you’ll have to
take a short field trip. First, get your diffraction grating and look through it at a
regular light bulb. Take a close look at the rainbows produced. Any gaps in the
colors, or is each rainbow continuous?
Now look through the diffraction grating at a streetlight or a neon sign (it
will help a lot if these are on at the time). What happens to those nice, continu-
ous rainbows? Any gaps now? In fact, there are lots of gaps. It’s as if streetlights
and neon signs don’t produce all the colors of the rainbow.
Still have the rope or latex tubing around? Good. Tie one end to a fixed
object as you did in Chapter 2. Move the free end up and down, slowly at first

1
There are lots of ways we know these things aren’t happening, but I’ll have to save those for a
different book.

2
See the Stop Faking It! book Energy for a thorough discussion of what we mean by energy.

Stop Faking It: Light 97

7 Chapter
and then faster. With a little practice, you can produce the patterns shown in
Figure 7.3. These are called standing waves.
Take note of how fast you move your hand up and down to get the various
patterns. When you move your hand up and down faster, we can say that you are
increasing the frequency at which your
hand moves. Now shorten the amount
Figure 7.3 of rope you’re using and try for the
same patterns. Do they occur at the
same frequencies as before?

More science stuff

Let’s start with the rope. Evidently, the
rope has certain frequencies it “likes.”
When you hit one of those frequencies,
you get the neat standing wave patterns.
The frequencies at which those patterns
occur are known as resonances.
When you shorten the rope, you get
different resonances.3
Atoms are a lot like ropes. There are
only certain frequencies of light that a
given atom will emit, and only certain
frequencies of light that an atom will
absorb (scientists refer to these as dis-
crete frequencies). This is because the al-
lowed energy levels (ledges on the cliff)
in an atom are like a fingerprint of the
atom. All hydrogen atoms have the same
set of energy levels, and all carbon at-
oms have the same set of energy levels.
If there are only certain allowed energy
levels in an atom, then there are only
certain differences in energy between two
levels. And here’s where photons
come into the picture. It turns out that

3
Actually, the tightness of the rope, the thickness
of the rope, and what the rope is made of, all
affect which frequencies result in standing waves.
We’re just trying to keep it simple here, though.

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 Chapter 7
you can view light, not as Figure 7.4
a bunch of waves with a
particular frequency, but
as a bunch of particles
with a particular energy.
The picture of light emis-
sion then becomes elec-
trons jumping from one
energy level to another
and emitting a photon as
they do that. The energy
of that emitted photon is
exactly equal to the differ-
ence in energy between
the two levels involved in
the jump. See Figure 7.4.
Now, even though we are thinking of the emitted light as a particle (a pho-
ton), that light still has a definite frequency in the visible spectrum. In fact, the
energy of the photon and the frequency of the emitted light are directly related
in the following way:
Energy of photon = (a number)(frequency of emitted light)
The number involved is the same for all photons, and it has a special name—
Planck’s constant (named after Max Planck, a physicist). Planck’s constant is
represented by the letter h. Frequency is usually represented by the Greek letter
Q (pronounced “nu”), so what you’ll run into in textbooks is the expression:
E = hQ
We’ll stop there before getting too far off track. The important thing to
remember is that you can represent light as waves or as particles, and the two
models are compatible. For explaining some observations, it’s best to think of
waves and for others, it’s best to think of particles. Okay, one more aside. It
turns out that this “wave-particle duality” works not just for light but every-
thing! You can represent protons and neutrons as wave packets or as particles. In
fact, you can represent a person as a big bundle of waves. It’s not a very useful
representation, but you can do it!
Now where were we? Oh yes, individual atoms have only certain allowed
energy levels and jumps between energy levels for their electrons. The energy
and frequency of any emitted or absorbed light must correspond to the differ-
ences in energy between these energy levels. In other words, a given atom can
only emit or absorb certain colors of light. You saw that when you looked at a
streetlight. Chances are that streetlight contains mercury gas, which glows when

Stop Faking It: Light 99

7 Chapter
you send an electrical current through it. The particular pattern of colors you
saw thorough the diffraction grating is mercury’s signature. Any time you
look at glowing mercury gas through a diffraction grating, you’ll see that same
pattern.
Okay, so all atoms emit only certain frequencies of light. Why then does an
ordinary lightbulb emit a full spectrum of light? Why not just the particular pat-
tern associated with tungsten (what the filament is made of)? The key is that the
tungsten filament in a lightbulb is a solid rather than a gas (as is the mercury
vapor in a streetlamp). The atoms in a solid are, on average, much closer together
than the atoms in a gas. It turns out that when atoms get really close to one
another, as in a solid, the energy levels in the atoms get distorted and smeared out.
This smearing out of the energy levels results in virtually all of the visible-light
energy transitions being possible. Therefore, you get a continuous spectrum. If
you excite tungsten vapor (a gas), however, then you’ll see distinct colors.
To summarize, we now have three different models for what light is—rays,
waves, and photons. Each model has its uses, so it’s not possible to say that one
model is correct and another is incorrect. That’s just how it goes with all scien-
tific models, not just those for light. Scientists create pictures and analogies that
are correct only to the extent that they explain observations and predict new
observations. It’s not unusual for a scientific model to explain observations only
up to a point. Just because the model breaks down at that point doesn’t mean
we throw out the model. In the case of light, a ray model doesn’t help at all to
explain interference, but because it’s useful for designing optical instruments,
we keep it around. A wave model of light falls apart in certain instances (a classic
one is the photoelectric effect—look it up in a physics text), but physicists still use
a wave model for other things.
The nature of scientific models aside, we haven’t covered all of the topics we
could with light. As with all the books in this series, the plan is to get your
understanding to the point that a) you can teach elementary concepts about
light with confidence and b) you are ready to tackle a more traditional textbook
if that’s what you want to do.

Chapter Summary
l Atoms emit light when their electrons go from a higher energy level to a
lower energy level. When atoms absorb light, the electrons go from lower to
higher energy levels.
l The energy contained in emitted light is exactly equal to the difference in
energy between the two levels involved in an electron transition. The emit-
ted light can be thought of as a series of waves or as a single photon. The

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 Chapter 7
energy contained in the photon is equal to hQ, where h is a number known
as Planck’s constant, and Q is the frequency of the light.
l Different atoms have different sets of characteristic energy levels. Thus, at-
oms emit discrete frequencies of light that amount to a “fingerprint” of
each atom. Such “atomic spectra” are the source of much of what we know
about the universe beyond our planet.

Applications
1. What is it that makes laser light so special? Well, when atoms emit light, they
do so randomly. There’s no overall pattern for when electrons jump levels, so
the light is emitted at different times. This means there’s no overall phase
relationship (whether the light waves are in sync or out of sync) between the
waves. In a laser, it’s possible to get the electrons of various atoms all at a
particular energy level at the same time and keep them there for a while. In
this situation, the electrons all have a sort of group mentality. They act as one.
When one electron jumps down to a lower energy level, the rest of them go
with it all at once (Figure 7.5). It’s not
Figure 7.5
unlike lemmings heading over a cliff.
When all of the electrons jump at
once, the light they emit is all in sync,
or in phase. This makes for a very pow-
erful set of light waves, because they
all add together constructively. Armed
with this explanation, you can under-
stand the words behind the acronym
laser. The letters stand for “light am-
plification by stimulated emission of
radiation.” Makes sense, no?
2. Fluorescent lights contain mercury vapor. When you run an electrical cur-
rent through the vapor, it excites the mercury atoms. However, in addition
to emitting visible light, those atoms emit primarily ultraviolet light. Why
then do we see regular light? Because the inside of a fluorescent tube is
coated with phosphors—molecules that glow when struck by certain frequen-
cies of light or by electrons. The ultraviolet light hits the phosphors, exciting
their atoms, causing them to emit their own, visible light. We end up with a
combination of visible light from the mercury vapor and visible light from
the phosphors. By the way, your TV screen also is coated with phosphors.
Electron guns (yes, they actually shoot electrons!) hit these phosphors, caus-
ing them to glow.

Stop Faking It: Light 101

7 Chapter
3. I know you’re just dying to know how glow-in-the-dark stickers work. Obvi-
ously, the source of energy you use to get the sticker electrons into higher
energy levels is light itself. You hold the stickers up to a light source, and
then they glow for a while. The reason they glow long after the light source
is taken away is that the electrons take their sweet time jumping back down
to lower energy levels. That’s just how the molecules in the stickers are put
together. Of course the light emitted by the stickers is never as bright as the
original light source because that original input of energy is sent back out
over such a long period of time.
4. Astronomers rely heavily on the “light signatures” of atoms (known as atomic
spectra) to figure out what’s going on in the universe. The particular pat-
terns of light emitted by distant stars can tell us what elements are in the
stars, how fast they’re moving and in what direction, and whether or not
they’re rotating. This kind of information is what led to the big bang theory
of the creation of the universe.

Topic: ultraviolet light

Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL13
Topic: speed of light
Go to: www.scilinks.org
Code: SFL14

102 National Science Teachers Association

 Glossary
blind spot. The place on the retina of the eye where the optic nerve leaves the
eye. The eye cannot detect any image that is formed here, leading to a blind spot
in vision. This has nothing to do with the blind spot in your car, where another
approaching car is hidden from view by your rearview mirrors.
color addition. The process of combining different-colored light from sepa-
rate sources to create new colors of light.
color subtraction. The process of using filters or paints to subtract out
certain frequencies of light from a single source of white light, producing differ-
ent colors.
concave lens. A lens that is thinner in the middle than at the edges. See
diverging lens.
cones.Light receptors that are concentrated in the center of the retina of the
eye. Cones detect color well and are most useful in bright light.
converging lens. A lens that bends light inward. Such a lens is thicker in the
middle than at the edges. See convex lens.
convex lens. A lens that is thicker in the middle than at the edges. See converg-
ing lens.
critical angle. The angle, measured from the normal to the interface be-
tween two mediums, at which light traveling from a more dense to a less dense
medium is totally internally reflected.
diffraction. The process by which light traveling through a single slit, or a
large number of slits, adds and subtracts, creating a pattern of light and dark
fringes. Diffraction is conceptually identical to interference.
diffraction grating. A glass or plastic sheet that contains thousands of closely
spaced slits. Light traveling through a diffraction grating separates into its com-
ponent frequencies.
diverging lens. A lens that bends light outward. Such a lens is thinner in the
middle than at the edges. See concave lens.
electromagnetic spectrum. The range of all possible frequencies of elec-
tromagnetic waves, including radio waves, microwaves, visible light, and X rays.
The spectrum of visible light is only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spec-
trum.

Stop Faking It: Light 103

Glossary

electromagnetic waves. Waves that consist of changing electric and mag-

netic fields that propagate even through empty space.
electron. An extremely tiny particle (actually thought of in most applications
as a “point object”) contained in atoms. When electrons jump from higher to
lower energy levels in an atom, they produce light. When electrons absorb light,
they jump from lower to higher energy levels.
Fermat’s principle. The principle that, in going from one place to another,
light rays will always take the path that requires the least amount of time.
fiber optics. Strands of transparent material that use total internal reflection to
carry light along the strands, allowing the sending and receiving of information.
focus. The point at which any optical tool (a lens, a reflector, or an antenna)
directs incoming parallel light rays.
fovea. The center area of the retina of the eye. The fovea contains primarily
cones as receptors.
frequency. The number of wavelengths of light (or sound, or any other kind
of wave) that pass a given point per second. Frequency is measured in hertz.
hertz. A unit of frequency that equals 1/second.
index of refraction. A number, related to the density of a medium, that
tells how fast light travels in that medium. Comparing the indices of refraction
of two mediums will indicate how much light will bend (refract), if at all, when
traveling from one medium to the other.
infrared light. Electromagnetic waves that have a slightly lower frequency
and slightly longer wavelength than visible light. Infrared light is radiated heat.
interference. The process by which light from two or more slits adds and
subtracts, creating a pattern of light and dark fringes. Interference is conceptu-
ally identical to diffraction.
laser. A special kind of light in which all the sources of light emit light “in
step” or “in phase,” leading to a very powerful light beam. Laser stands for light
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
law of reflection. A statement that light incident on a reflective surface and
light reflected from that surface make identical angles with the normal line to
the surface.
lens. An optical instrument that uses refraction to direct light beams in a de-
sired path.
light. The thing that allows us to see objects. Light can be modeled as rays,
electromagnetic waves, or photons. Also something you’re supposed to go to-
wards when you die.

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 Glossary

medium. A scientific name for a given substance of a given density. Also, the
size of drink that costs just a quarter less than a large at the movies, yet still has
a price of $3.00.
microwaves. Electromagnetic waves with a lower frequency than infrared waves
but a higher frequency than radio waves. Very useful for cooking things.
nanometer. A very small unit of length, equal to 0.000000001 of a meter. Use-
ful for measuring the wavelength of light.
normal line. A line that is perpendicular to a plane surface.
optic nerve. Actually an entire bundle of nerves that take information re-
ceived by the receptors in the eye and transmit it to the brain.
parabola. A particular curved shape. When used as a reflector, a parabola
directs incoming electromagnetic waves to the focus of the parabola, and sends
waves emitting from the focus out as parallel rays.
photon. A particle of light that has an energy related to the frequency of the
corresponding light wave.
polarized light. Light that has its electric field vibrations oriented in a par-
ticular direction, or in a definite pattern of successive directions.
reflection. When light bounces off a surface.
refraction. When light bends in traveling from one medium to another.
retina. The back portion of the eye that contains light receptors.
rods. Light receptors that are concentrated in the outer parts of the retina.
Rods are most sensitive in dim light, and do not detect color well.
scattering. The process of light being absorbed, and then reradiated, by atoms
and molecules. Rayleigh scattering is the process in which blue light is scattered
predominantly in a plane perpendicular to the direction of travel of the light.
Snell’s law. A relationship that describes precisely how light will bend, or
refract, when traveling from one medium to another. This relationship is writ-
ten as n1 sin θ1 = n2 sin θ2 , where the index of refraction of medium 1 is n1 and
the index of refraction of medium 2 is n2. θ1 is the angle between the incident
light ray and the normal line, and θ2 is the angle between the refracted light ray
and the normal line.
total internal reflection. A phenomenon in which light traveling from a
more dense to a less dense medium is entirely reflected back into the more
dense medium.
transverse waves. Waves that vibrate in a plane perpendicular to the direc-
tion of travel of the waves.

Stop Faking It: Light 105

Glossary

ultraviolet light. Light with a slightly higher frequency and slightly shorter
wavelength than visible light. “Black lights” emit primarily ultraviolet light.
unpolarized light. Light waves with electric fields that have no pattern of
orientation of their direction of vibration.
wavelength. The distance in which a wave repeats its pattern.
X rays. Electromagnetic waves with a frequency greater than visible or ultravio-
let light. Useful things for discovering bone fractures.

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 Index
Page numbers in boldface type indicate figures.

A
Absorption and reradiation of light, 33, 33, 38, 42, 65, 77
Angle
critical, 11, 11, 103
of incidence, 4–5, 5, 14, 21
of reflection, 4–5, 5, 14, 21
Atomic spectra, 101, 102
Atoms, 26
absorption and reradiation of light by, 33, 33, 38, 42, 65, 77
energy levels of, 99–101
light emitted by, 96–100
light signatures of, 101, 102

B
Binoculars, 57, 57–58
Blind spot, 87, 103

C
Calcite, 67
Camera, 58, 80
pinhole, 48–50, 48–50
Color addition, 36–37, 36–37, 43, 103
Color subtraction, 35–36, 35–36, 37, 43, 103
Colors of light, 27–28, 28, 32–43
applications of, 42–43
in blue sky, 40–41, 41, 67
due to absorption and reradiation, 33, 33, 38, 42, 65–66, 66, 77
filters and, 32, 32–36, 34–36, 42–43
frequency and, 28, 28, 34–37, 34–37, 42
identification with peripheral vision, 84, 84, 86

Stop Faking It: Light 107

Index

interference and, 74–75, 74–76, 78, 79, 80

in oil films, 71, 74–75, 74–75
in rainbows, 27, 37, 40–41, 40–41, 76, 79
in red sunsets, 41, 41
sensitivity of rods and cones to, 86–87
in soap bubbles, 71, 75
Computer monitors, 93
Concave (diverging) lens, 53, 53, 56, 103
nearsightedness and, 93
Cones (eye), 86, 92, 103
Constructive interference, 72, 72–73, 77–78, 79
Converging (convex) lens, 52, 53–55, 54–55, 56, 103
farsightedness and, 93
Cornea, 85, 85, 92
reshaping of, 93
Critical angle, 11, 11, 103
Crystals, 27

D
Destructive interference, 72–73, 72–73, 77–78, 79
Diffraction, 78–79, 78–79, 80, 103. See also Interference
Diffraction grating, 27, 69, 76, 79, 79, 97, 100, 103
Discrete frequencies, 98
Distance perception, 90–91, 90–92
Diverging (concave) lens, 53, 53, 56, 103
nearsightedness and, 93

E
Electric fields, 29–30
of polarized light, 63, 63, 66
of unpolarized light, 60–63, 60–63, 66
Electromagnetic spectrum, 31, 31, 103
Electromagnetic waves, 30–31, 31, 60, 97, 104
parabolic reflectors for, 47–48, 47–48
Electron guns, 93, 101
Electrons, 33, 104
energy levels of, 96, 96–97, 101, 101
in light production, 96–97
light waves and, 26, 29
radio waves and, 28–29, 29

108 National Science Teachers Association

 Index

Energy
in emitted light, 99, 99, 100–101
sources of, 97
Eye function, 83–94
blind spot, 87
color detection, 84, 84, 86–87
distance perception, 90–91, 90–92
farsightedness, 92–93, 92–93
floaters, 93–94, 94
nearsightedness, 92–93, 92–93
persistence of vision, 93
3-D effect, 87–89, 87–89, 91, 91–92
under water, 93
Eye structure, 85, 85
Eyeglasses, 53
Eyepiece
of binoculars, 57, 57
of telescope, 56, 57

F
Farsightedness, 92–93, 92–93
Fermat, Pierre de, 21
Fermat’s principle, 7, 21, 21, 104
Fiber optics, 11–12, 11–12, 104
Filters, 32, 32–36, 34–36
applications of, 42–43
polarized, 59–67, 60, 63–65
3-D effect and, 89, 90–92, 91
Floaters, 93–94, 94
Fluorescent lights, 97, 101
Focal point of lens, 53, 54, 54–55
Focus, 47–48, 48, 104
of eye, 86
Formulas, 9
for index of refraction, 9
for Planck’s constant, 99
Fovea, 85, 86, 104
Frequency, 104
discrete, 98
of light, 28, 28–31, 31
colors due to, 28, 28, 34–37, 34–37, 42

Stop Faking It: Light 109

Index

emitted by atoms, 99–101

speed in different mediums, 39
of microwaves, 30, 31
of radio waves, 30, 31
of standing waves, 98, 98
wavelength and, 25, 25, 27, 28, 42

G
Gamma rays, 31, 31
Geometrical optics, 55
Glass
index of refraction of, 9, 10
refraction as light travels from air into, 10, 10, 39, 39
Glossary, 103–106
Glow-in-the-dark items, 96, 97, 102
Glow sticks, 97

H
Hertz, 28, 28–29, 104
Hertz, Heinrich, 29
Holograms, 80
Hubble Space Telescope, 57

I
Index of refraction, 8–9, 9, 17, 93, 104
Infrared light, 31, 31, 46–47, 104
Interference, 72–80, 104
applications of, 80–81
colors of light and, 74–75, 74–76, 78, 79, 80
constructive, 72, 72–73, 77–78, 79
destructive, 72–73, 72–73, 77–78, 79
diffraction and, 78, 79
holograms and, 80
Interlacing, 93
Iris of eye, 85, 86

L
Laser, 70, 73, 73, 101, 104

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Law
of reflection, 5, 21, 21, 104
Snell’s, 9–10, 9–10, 21, 105
Lens(es), 52–56, 104
binocular, 57, 57–58
camera, 58
contact, 53
converging (convex), 52, 53–55, 54–55, 56, 103
diverging (concave), 53, 53, 56, 103
eyeglass, 53
focal point of, 53, 54, 54–55
telescope, 56, 56–57
Lens of eye, 85, 85–86, 92
Light, 104
absorption and reradiation of, 33, 33, 38, 42, 65, 77
colors of, 27–28, 28, 31–43
frequencies of, 28, 28–31, 31
infrared, 31, 31, 46–47, 104
least-time path of, 21, 21
particle model of, 98–100, 99
polarized, 59, 63, 63, 66, 105
production of, 95–97
energy sources for, 96–97
ray model of, 3–4, 3–6, 17, 32, 100
reflection of, 1–5, 2–5
refraction of, 6–10, 6–10
speed of, 21, 38–39
ultraviolet, 31, 31, 46, 101, 106
unpolarized, 61–63, 61–63, 66, 106
wave model of, 26, 26, 27, 42, 100
Light waves, 26, 26, 27, 42, 71–73
interference of, 72–75, 72–80

M
Magnetic fields, 29–30
Magnifying glass, 43, 51–52, 51–55, 54–55
Matter, light interactions with, 33, 33, 38, 42
Medium(s), 7–10, 17, 105
density of, 8
speed of light and, 21, 38–39
temperature and, 19

Stop Faking It: Light 111

Index

index of refraction of, 8–9, 9

Snell’s law for, 9–10, 9–10
Mercury vapor, 99–100, 101
Microwaves, 30, 105
Mirages, 19, 19
Mirrors
curved, 14–15, 14–15
image reversal in, 20, 21
judging distance of object viewed in, 13–14, 14
light reflection off, 1–5, 2–5, 12–14, 13–14
parabolic, 57
two-way, 18, 18
Movie projectors, 93

N
Nanometers, 28, 105
Nearsightedness, 92–93, 92–93
Neon signs, 97
Neutrons, 26
Normal line, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 105
Nuclear reactions, 97

O
Objective lens of telescope, 56, 57
Optic nerve, 85, 105
Optics
fiber, 11–12, 11–12, 104
geometrical, 55
Oxidation, 97

P
Parabola, 47, 47, 105
Parabolic mirrors, 57
Parabolic reflectors, 47–48, 47–48, 56
Particle theory of light, 98–100, 99
Peripheral vision, 84, 84, 86
Persistence of vision, 93
Phosphors, 101
Photoelectric effect, 100

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Photons, 95, 98–102, 99, 105

Pinhole camera, 48–50, 48–50
Planck, Max, 99
Planck’s constant, 99, 100
Pointillism, 43
Polarized filters, 59–67, 60, 63–65
Polarized light, 59, 63, 63, 66, 105
Polarized sunglasses, 59, 66–67
for 3-D movies, 92
Prisms, 27, 40
of binoculars, 57, 57
Protons, 26
Pupil of eye, 86

R
Radio waves, 29–30, 29–30
Rainbows, 27, 37, 40–41, 40–41, 76, 79, 80, 97
Ray model of light, 3–4, 3–6, 17, 32, 100
Reflecting telescope, 56, 57
Reflection, 1–5, 2–5, 17, 105
angle of, 4–5, 5, 15
applications of, 17–18, 18, 20, 20
law of, 5, 21, 21, 104
off a mirror, 1–5, 2–5, 12–14, 13–14
polarization and, 66–67
total internal, 11–12, 11–12, 17, 105
Reflectors, 46, 46–48
parabolic, 47–48, 47–48, 56
Refracting telescope, 56, 57
Refraction, 6–10, 6–10, 17, 105
applications of, 19–20, 19–20
index of, 8–9, 9, 17, 93, 104
mediums and, 7–10, 9–10, 17
light frequency and, 39
Reradiation of light, 33, 33, 38, 42, 65, 77
Resonances, 98
Retina, 85, 85, 86, 92, 105
Rods (eye), 86, 92, 105

Stop Faking It: Light 113

Index

S
Scattering, 41, 67, 105
Scientific models, 3, 5, 26, 100
SciLinks, x
dispersion of light, 43
electromagnetic spectrum, 31
eye, 86
interference, 81
LASIK, 94
lenses, 58
light and color, 43
properties of light, 21
reflection, 5
refraction, 10
ultraviolet light, 102
wavelength, 26
Shadows, 80
Snell’s law, 9–10, 9–10, 21, 105
Sound waves, 29–30, 29–30, 70, 70–73, 72–73
Speed of light, 21, 38–39
Standing waves, 98, 98
Streetlights, 97, 99–100
Sunglasses, polarized, 59, 66–67
for 3-D movies, 92

T
Telescope, 56–57
eyepiece lens of, 57
Hubble Space, 57
objective lens of, 57
reflecting, 56, 57
refracting, 56, 57
Very Large Array, 81
Television screens, 93, 101
3-D drawings and movies, 87–89, 87–89, 91, 91–92
Total internal reflection, 11–12, 11–12, 17, 105
Transverse waves, 24, 24, 105
Tungsten filament of light bulb, 100
Two-way mirrors, 18, 18

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U
Ulexite, 12, 12
Ultraviolet light, 31, 31, 46, 101, 106
Unpolarized light, 61–63, 61–63, 66, 106

V
Very Large Array, 81
Visible spectrum, 28, 28
Vision. See Eye function
Vitreous humor, 85, 94

W
Water
index of refraction of, 9, 93
light ray traveling from air to, 6–8, 6–8
ripple waves in, 24, 24, 27, 27
vision under, 93
Wave fronts, 27, 27, 39, 39, 52–53, 53–53
Wave model of light, 26, 26, 27, 42, 100
Wavelength, 25, 25–27, 42, 106
frequency and, 25, 25, 27, 28, 42
of light, 26, 26, 28
measurement of, 28
Waves, 23–25, 23–27
electromagnetic, 30–31, 31, 60, 97, 104
parabolic reflectors for, 47–48, 47–48
interference of, 72, 72
microwaves, 30, 105
radio, 29–30, 29–30
sound, 70, 70–73, 72–73
speed and size of, 24, 24
standing, 98, 98
transverse, 24, 24, 105
White light, 27, 34, 34, 37

X
X rays, 31, 31, 106

Stop Faking It: Light 115