Team:UiOslo Norway/Modelling
Modelling
Safety
Physics 101 - Light
Electromagnetic radiation is energy travelling as waves or photons. This is not the place or the time to go into this discussion [1] but Einstein and Infeld said it well:
"But what is light really? Is it a wave or a shower of photons? There seems no likelihood for forming a consistent description of the phenomena of light by a choice of only one of the two languages. It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do."
- Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, pg. 262-263.
Light, or the visible light spectrum range from \( \in [400 - 700] \) nm in the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. XX insert picture of Elmag spectrum here XX.
Above, with higher wavelengths, you will find infrared radiation (also known as IR), and under you will find the ultraviolet radiation (also known as UV). We call it visible light due to the fact that our eyes can only "pick up" these wavelengths. For this project we will mostly focus on light \( \lambda \in [470,520] \) nm region.
You have probably heard that nothing can travel faster than light? But not that many (non-physicist) remembers what velocity light actually travels with. In most cases it's enough to say that light travels in \( \sim 3.0 \cdot 10^{8}\) m/s in vacuum or \( \sim 6.7 {\cdot 10^{8}} \)mph.
When talking about light there is a couple of expressions that is good to know the meaning of
- Monochromatic
- Coherent
- Wavelength
- Optical Path
