Supernova explosions are rather rare events so the last one seen by the naked eye in our galaxy was described by Johannes Kepler in 1604. For several months, that was the brightest star in the sky so one can … Continue reading
Tag Archives: light
The speed of sound waves as well as the speed of light is not changed by the motion of a source of waves. For example, when a sound source moves towards a listener, each next vibration reaches the listener’s … Continue reading
The electric field strength of light waves coming from the Sun is of course oriented randomly. There were found some transparent compounds which allow a light wave to pass through only having definite direction of the wave field strength. … Continue reading
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet physicists worked actively and nevertheless made a number of fundamental discoveries. At first, however, they were not isolated from the world — they learned from and worked with European scientists. One of the founding … Continue reading
Increasing the visible size keeping the same amount of light emitted When we look at a distant source of light that spreads in all directions, we see only a portion of the photons emitted by it. As the distance from … Continue reading
On the indifference of photons to the velocity of their own source Crucial in this regard was the experiment conducted by Michelson and Morley in 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. There were observed fringes formed by the interference of light passing … Continue reading
On the difference of radio waves from the sound vibrations in the air Light and sound — that is what from time immemorial people imagined like something flying or self-spreading. Following the ancient scholars, in the Renaissance they believed that … Continue reading
On the emission of quanta of light waves — photons In 1905, Albert Einstein proposed a far-reaching generalization of Planck’s hypothesis of discrete radiation and successfully applied it to explain the properties of the photoelectric effect. Initially, these Einstein’s views … Continue reading
Doing real that exists in fantasies A striking example of the implementation of the human imagination is a laser. The power of a narrow beam of light has long been intuitively realized by people and was immortalized in the novels … Continue reading