"Go ask your mommy," I said!
See how easy that was.
Then there are questions that are a little trickier to answer. Like yesterday when he asked, "what is light?" Why do kids have to be so curious? I didn't know what to say. Somehow my usual response to these types of questions...it's magic, son...just didn't seem appropriate. So I did what any self respecting parent would do. I changed the subject.
Doesn't my son know that his Dad is scientifically deficient. The last science class I took was in Grade 11, and it was Earth Science, which was really a remedial class for losers who had no aptitude for the "real" sciences. Most students dissected pigs and frogs, or amputated their classmates' limbs. Some got high learning the chemistry period table, while others debated frictional and centripetal forces. We learned about rocks. I digress.
Why didn't he ask what the capital of Burkina Faso is? Or the deepest part of the world's oceans? Or the currency used in Panama? (In case you'd like to impress someone at your next cocktail party, it's...Ouagadougou, Mariana Trench, and the U.S. Dollar.)
Later, and wanting to feel enlightened, I did a Google search on light. I'm more confused now than I was when I was ignorant about these types of things.
Light waves are a little more complicated (no kidding), and they do not need a medium to travel through. They can travel through a vacuum. A light wave consists of energy in the form of electric and magnetic fields. The fields vibrate at right angles to the direction of movement of the wave, and at right angles to each other. Because light has both electric and magnetic fields, it is also referred to as electromagnetic radiation.
Light not only vibrates at different frequencies, it also travels at different speeds. Light waves move through a vacuum at their maximum speed, 300,000 kilometers per second or 186,000 miles per second, which makes light the fastest phenomenon in the universe. Light waves slow down when they travel inside substances, such as air, water, glass or a diamond. The way different substances affect the speed at which light travels is key to understanding the bending of light, or refraction.Sure...now how am I supposed to explain that to my son?
"Better go ask your mommy!"
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3 comments:
I'm surprised mommy lets daddy get away with that stuff.
Once you're a daddy you'll learn how easy it is to get away with stuff due to the greatly increased background noise.
- Geoff G.
PS BTW http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light has this to say about Light: Light is a type of energy, which "means" it is non-matter and cannot be touched. Matter has been created by slamming light into light, using a particle collider. Anything with a temperature above absolute zero emits (gives off) light. Light is also called "electromagnetic radiation". Light is made up of tiny particles called photons.
Light moves at the speed of light, about 300,000 km, or about 186,000 miles, per second. This means it takes about 8 min. for light to reach Earth from the sun.
Light moves in a straight line, creating shadows when the path of light is blocked. More solid things will have a darker shadow, things that are more clear have a lighter shadow, and transparent things will have none or very little shadow. Light can pass through transparent things the most easily. Our eye/s react to light; when we see something we see the light it reflects, or the light it emits. For example, a lamp gives off light, and everything else in the same room as the lamp reflects its light.
Every color of light has a different wavelength. The shorter the wavelength, the more energy the light has. All light moves at the same speed, no matter how much energy it has, except when going through a partly clear object, but the speed difference is still very small.
White light is made up of many different colors of light added together. When white light shines through a prism, it splits up into different colors, becoming a rainbow. The rainbow contains all of the wavelengths of light that we can see. Red light has the longest wavelength, and violet (purple) light has the shortest.
Light with a wavelength shorter than violet is called ultraviolet light. Light with a wavelength longer than red is called infrared light. Radio waves are a form of light with a wavelength even longer than infrared light. The microwaves that are used to heat food in a microwave oven are also a form of light. Our eyes cannot see those kinds of light, but there are some cameras that can see them.
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