In my last post I noted that it is said that light has momentum, but not mass. If one considers mass to be a property of Planck spheres in orbit, the sentence is true. But I think it's a silly way of defining mass, so I'll just say that light also has mass.
So what is the relation with light and regular matter? Well, the light we see in the daytime is generated by a black body radiator, the sun. Most of the momentum of this light that is converted into mass is achieved by photosynthesis. Or more specifically chlorophyll capturing rings of light and increasing their mass a bit. This mass is then converted into the production of sugars from water and carbon dioxide. This sugar is converted into cellulose that makes up almost half of the dry mass of plants. And of course the mass is also used to produce lignin, which is almost as common as cellulose.
But let's step back a bit. See, most matter does not really convert the energy of light into increased mass. No: most of light absorbed by matter is converted to heat. Or more specifically, absorbed light increases the temperature of all matter. However, all matter emits this absorbed heat as a black body radiator, just like the sun, but just at wavelength so long that we need infrared cameras to see the 'light' (well it's not light, if you can't see it, but electromagnetic radiation).
I think I haven't mentioned this in my post, but all gases and liquids are kept rotating by 'light'. The black body radiation are true rings of light that not only move as unconfined light, but keep gases and liquid rotating: that is the speed of the ring of light has switched from being perpendicular to the plane of the ring to become tangential. This highly technical phrase is the comparison of dropping a plate from in comparison to spinning it on a stick. That is: nothing has happened to the momentum of individual Planck spheres.
So what happens when light is absorbed? It's not too different to a game of ring toss. The rings of light hit a supramolecular shell, or a cluster of them. The shell has to have a shape that transfers the movement of the ring from perpendicular to tangential. The best absorbers are a mat of long rods, like vantablack. However, if you want to transfer the spinning motion of light into usable energy, this is a bit more complicated. In plants, you have chlorophyll that do this in chloroplasts.
The rods you see in the image are chlorophyll whose length equals their absorbance. These clusters absorb rings of blue and red light, but not green light, whose size is allows it to pass through unbsorbed. While I have no expertise in chlorophyll, I've measured the absorption spectra of sufficiently many porphyrin compounds that have the same core structure, so I can say I have some expertise.
It appears that the 400-500 nm absorption peak of chlorophyll seems to relate to a ring stretched over the rod, as the length of the rods is clearly larger than 500 nm (looking at the scale bar below right).
So the light of the sun is absorbed by chlorophyll and it converts to the mass of chlorophyll and that's it, right? Well, not exactly. The chlorophyll molecule is excited, and this energy has to be released to the plant for photosynthesis. If not, chlorophyll releases part of the energy as fluorescence. And part of the energy is converted to heat.
But what is heat? Even though most things on planet earth don't glow with visible light, they are also black body radiators nevertheless. The diameter of the infrared light emitted living organisms, from about 0 °C to 40 °C is from ~10 600 nm to 9 250 nm. These rings are abstract things, but actual rotating rings that keep liquids and gases rotating. But these rings are not attached to rotating supramolecular shells in any way, so once they 'escape' from the substance they are spinning, their speed is transferred from rotational to fully perpendicular and can be observed by thermographic cameras.
So is there just one supramolecular shell spinning inside these spinning rings of light? Not exactly. The supramolecular shell is a double sphere, so these double spheres aggregate. The simplest symmetrical cluster of these double spheres is a Waterman polyhedron of W10 O1 type, with each of the edges being two spheres long. But it isn't just the cluster that is spinning with the help of the rings of light, but also the supramolecular shells within the cluster. But how they spin, have to be addressed in another post.
And how do I know all of this? The answer is that all of the bits and pieces were already gathered by thousands upon thousands of researchers. But the only way to combine them to an intelligible whole is to understand that light is a ring and that there are supramolecular shells.
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