Phascinating Phacts about Photons

Phascinating Phacts about Photons (well, light)

My gambol into alliteration ends with that dreadful series of fricatives, which I found too tempting to resist.

When a scientist talks about photons, he means light. Photons are the massless particles that move between something you see and your eyes, so that your eyes can send messages to your brain, allowing you to have the sense of sight. Photons are the part of the whole process of sight that is outside your body. It's a sophisticated process and the photons part no less so than the things that happen inside your head.

Photons have no mass, yet they are particles. That, alone, is counterintuitive. The mystery doesn't end there. Photons have been around since shortly after the Big Bang. We don't know about their goings on until about 500,000 years after the Big Bang because before that they weren't visible. Did they exist and were held in by unimaginably huge gravity, greater than any black hole? Unknown. We do know that photons only floated freely after that initial period.

That's why astronomers and cosmologists say they can't see back to the dawn of existence as we know it, as photons--if they existed--couldn't escape during that first half million years. Without photons coming to meet our eyes, we can't see.

Photons, being light, travel at the speed of light (186,282.4 miles per hour, 298.051.84 kilometres per hour). No surprise there. But did they, if they existed right after the Big Bang, travel at faster than the speed of light, as other known particles did during that mysterious early period of our universe? Unknown. Travelling faster than the speed of light flies in the face of Einstein's proof that nothing can travel faster than light. Or is it just particles without mass that can do that? Unknown, likely, still strange. Lots of speculation, no evidence to date.

Photons travelling through space don't actually travel at the speed of light. They travel a bit slower, possibly because they must travel through dark energy or dark matter. Oh, don't go there, it's too messy to think about. Photons only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Photons also originate deep in the core of our sun. The early universe photons still hang around, causing "snow" on the screen of a badly tuned television screen and static on a radio that is not tuned to a station. Collectively they form what science calls the cosmic microwave background.

Unlike the exotic neutrinos that stop or slow for almost nothing (thousands can pass through your body every second while doing no damage), photons actually slow down when travelling through something less dense than space. In diamonds they tend to bounce around back and forth among the carbon atoms before finding their way out. This lends diamonds their sparkle. Photons travel through diamonds at a pondering 77,500 miles per second (124,000 kilometres per second).

Eyeglasses and contacts enable people to have their vision corrected because light bends when it moves from air to glass or plastic. Thus the lenses focus light the eyeballs cannot.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that our eyes shoot out rays of light so we can see. I suspect that story may have been twisted over the years because someone of Plato's brilliance would realize that we couldn't see unless those rays bounced back to our eyes. Good story, but likely a perverted folk tale.

However, our bodies do glow beyond what pregnant women are said to give off when a new baby is expected. Especially from our lips and cheeks, we glow from bioluminescence, like all living things. We glow most in the afternoon. The glow may have something to do with chemical reactions in molecular fragments called free radicals.

In the deep ocean, below 1500 feet, at least 90 percent of the animals have the option of glowing through bioluminescence. Some do it to attract mates, others to find prey or other food.

Second World War aviators were known to find darkened ships by the bioluminescence of their wakes. Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, as a pilot back in 1954, found his way back to his own aircraft carrier using this method.

Europe will ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012 because they are inefficient. They convert only 10 percent of the power they use into light. The rest becomes heat, which apparently European legislators find unwanted. Their replacements, compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB), are much more efficient in terms of creating light. But they remain controversial in situations where they are closer than 18 inches (45 cm) to a person's head--such as on a bedside table--because they give off a small amount of radiation.

When LED bulbs become more commercially viable they will likely take over dominance in the market because they give off no radiation and are even more efficient than CFBs. And they last a very long time.

A 100-watt incandescent bulb in an Easy-Bake oven can raise the temperature inside to 325 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to bake a cake. Maybe European legislators don't eat Easy-Bake cakes either.

Though light lacks mass, as a form of particle it can push when it strikes something. Late in 2010 the Planetary Society will launch Lightsail-1, a space vehicle designed to use photon power to push it along. Theory says that while photons push and nothing else pushes back (we don't know yet about dark energy and dark matter), a ship could reach interplanetary speed in two years. Stopping without power when such a ship reaches another planet or even back at earth could be a problem.

Our moon is moving farther away from earth at the rate of 1.5 inches (3.3 cm) per year. We know that because scientists continue to bounce light off mirrors left on the moon back in the Apollo days.

In the electromagnetic spectrum that stretches from radio to gamma waves, visible light makes up less than one ten-billionth of the spectrum. Goldfish can see infrared, which we can't. Bees, birds and lizards can see ultraviolet, which is just beyond the other end of the spectrum we can see.

The word "photography" was coined by astronomer John Herschel, who discovered infrared. "Photography" means "writing with light."

At the equinoxes, vernal and autumnal (they occur simultaneously, depending on whether you live north of south of the equator) everyone on the planet has equal numbers of minutes of daylight and darkness in a 24 hour period.

The aurora borealis (the northern version) and aurora australis (southern) light up the night sky when solar wind particles excite atoms in the upper atmosphere. Oxygen shines as green while nitrogen glows blue and red. Now you can watch with awe and amazement and actually know what you are seeing in the night sky.

To the Inuit (living in northern Canada and Greenland--their enemies the Algonquians called them Eskimos, "eaters of raw flesh" but that name is no longer used) believe that the aurora borealis is the spirits of their dead ancestors hovering to keep them safe. At least that's the myth. In the developed world, myths are thought to be fantasies believed by simple people. In fact, true myths are life lessons told in story form, surrounded by fictitious stories to make them more memorable to young people who hear them.

People in the developed world pay little attention to myths and don't find time to teach life lessons to their children. Look around you to see the results. Myths have a valid purpose, but it's not to perpetuate fantastic stories. Now you too can see the light.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read book parents and teachers can use to teach life lessons to their children.
Learn more about the book and the worldwide TIA project at http://billallin.com/

Blind In My Mind's Eye

Blind In My Mind's Eye


"All the exams the scientists gave [study subject] MX confirmed his claim that he was missing his mind's eye."
"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about MX is that he did not need years to develop this new skill [of routing visual information through other brain parts than the mind's eye in order to develop an intellectual concept to replace the mind's eye images he lacked]...Perhaps his blind imagination was always available to him, ready to be used."
- Carl Zimmer, Discover, March 2010

"In your mind's eye..." has been spoken to me only a few times in my life, but I have read it on several occasions.

Unlike MX, who lost his familiar and much appreciated mind's eye suddenly at the age of 65, I never had one. Rather, it might be more accurate to say that my mind's eye is nearly blind.

Do a little experiment with me. Picture in your mind, one at a time, each of the following:
(1) the face of your mother;
(2) the face of your spouse (if this is not appropriate, the face of your father or one particular friend);
(3) your favourite pet in your life (if this is not appropriate, the face of your doctor).

Were you able to bring those faces up as you read them? I can't. When I try it's as if I have a blind spot where the face should be, yet I can get a general idea (not clear) of what I would see with my periphery vision if I were looking at these people with my real eyes.

As I write this my wife is on a different floor of the same house as I am sitting in, yet I cannot picture her face in my head, in my mind's eye. I could pick her out of a crowd of thousands of real people, yet I have no image of her face in my head.

Though my dreams have people in them, I can't recognize any of them. They have no faces to me. I dream in thoughts, not in images. I may have the odd image flash through my dream, but it's nothing like a movie.

Moreover, when I have wakened I can't remember my dreams. Even when I wake up knowing that I have just been dreaming, I have only experienced remembering what I dreamed about a dozen times in my life.

If you can do these things as part of our experiment, you have an active mind's eye.

Who cares? Science now knows that when you sleep you consolidate and fix in your brain your experiences of the previous day. Which experiences you choose to review while asleep determine which you can draw upon easily the following day or days.

When you studied, as a student, during the days before an exam, you created an easily accessible place you could get to if that information were requested on the exam. You created those quick-access locations in your sleep on the days following when you studied.

But...study? What's that? What does it mean? I honestly don't know. It did me no good to study before exams because by the time I had the exam booklet in front of me I had forgotten what I studied. Even when I sat with my notes in front of me, studying meant little because I couldn't remember what I had read a few minutes after reading it.

That bit of consolidating and fixating of recently read material for later retrieval may well be one of the functions of the mind's eye. It's not used just when you are asleep, as our little experiment showed.

The great sculptor Michelangelo, when asked why he pounded so hard on a large rock, allegedly responded "Young boy, there is an angel inside of this rock and I am setting him free." Michelangelo could see David inside the rock. I would only ever see rock.

As a child I dreaded those rare occasions when we had art class. Art class always meant painting, where a large blank piece of paper was placed in front of me. While my classmates happily created their masterpieces, I continued to see only blank paper. No image ever came to mind that I could transfer onto the paper.

An image would have had to be in my mind's eye. It wasn't there. Ever.

Study subject MX lost his mind's eye at age 65. Before that he used to lie down in bed before going to sleep and review the events of his day, like watching a filmstrip or movie clips. When he lost that ability, he quickly adapted by using other parts of his brain to accomplish formerly mind's eye tasks.

I never had a mind's eye. Yet I always felt the need to create in my mind, something, so I could make sense of my world. MX had a mind's eye, lost it, then used other means to compensate.

People who have all the physical connections for sight, yet are blind, often have what is called blindsight or blindimagination. Though blind, many can navigate their way through a room crowded with furniture, for example. Do we all have blindsight or blindimagination ability but not use it? Or do we use it in ways we have not yet discovered?

The researchers who studied MX, Adam Zeman, a neurologist at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England, and cognitive scientist Sergio Della Sala, of the University of Edinburgh, continue to study how the brain manages visual information. In this field of study, it's still early days.

My experiences, those of MX and the studies of Zeman and Della Sala clearly demonstrate that children need to be offered a variety of learning styles because of the differences in their ways of learning. In education, a one-size-fits-all style of teaching means some children will miss out. Innocent and unknowing children will be blamed for being at fault for not learning as they should. Some schools address the need for different learning styles, most do not.

I couldn't even count on all my fingers the number of times "not working to his potential" appeared on my report cards, nor the number of times my mother was told in parent-teacher interviews that I was lazy. The schools I attended as a child had ways to assess my intellectual potential, but lacked the means to put it to use.

To my teachers I was lazy. Except in physical education where I was also weak and uncoordinated, which somehow also got to be my fault. The role me lack of a working mind's eye played in any of this will not be known for some time.

Suffice to say, I managed to work around the detours to reaching my intellectual potential, though many years after completing my formal education. I still can't throw a baseball straight or walk a balance beam without falling, even when cold sober and in the best of health. Maybe the brain can only adapt around one detour and has to choose which will take top priority.

At age 67 I am no longer called lazy. However, some people still don't appreciate why I sometimes can't follow simple spoken instructions or written directions. I have solved some of the most profound mysteries of life, yet I still can't find Waldo.

No one today wants to teach a man who is smart enough to have found evidence of what God really is and what the afterlife means. He's scary. Yet no one wants to teach a man who is so dumb he can't put together a child's puzzle. They are the same man, same brain, different abilities.

My education continues to be based on my own initiative. As a student, I am still a dunce, an oaf who is "too lazy to learn." Other adults, many of them, may not have the motivation I had to learn. So they don't. You meet these people in stores, or driving the streets with you, or at voting stations.

When people have trouble learning because what they need to know is presented in ways they can't understand, many just give up. Teachers need to recognize learning differences before that happens to their students. More importantly, teachers need to be trained on how to recognize the needs their students have for different learning styles. They have to understand and have the skills before they can put them to use on their students.

Before the kids drop out of school, and sometimes out of socially accepted behaviour.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a fancy sounding title for a book of ideas and solutions everyone can understand and teachers and parents can use.
Learn more about the book and the TIA project at http://billallin.com/