Today I go back to basics. The basics being the properties of light. Last time I talked about the properties of matter and showed helices twisted into a rather complex circle. This time I ask: “if matter looked like that, what does light look like?” I’ve sort of already shown what light looks like, it being a circle in vacuum and a helix when moving in anything with a refractive index higher than one. However, I’ve never really shown a circle of light with dots. I think the reason has always been that I haven’t seen the point in the illustration if the image conveys no other information.
But since my last post, I’ve known that the reason why dots are never in a straight line is because of refraction. And refraction can always be illustrated with cones of refraction. And this can be quite easily shown with light, if one reduces the number of dots in a circular array to such a small number that the cones of refraction become impossibly large.
Below is an image that I made with 25 spheres. This isn’t a magical number or anything like that, but I first tried to do the illustration with 100 spheres and the cones already became so small that it was hard to see anything. So here each dot (sphere) is touching and the inner edges of the cones of refraction form straight lines from the center of one dot to another. I made a small error in determining the size of the spheres, so for now the sphere isn’t fully closed. I’ll have to correct this for the Theory of Everything manuscript.
If we zoom a bit, we can see that the edges of the cones indeed form a linear vectors from center to center. Or they would, had I been a bit more precise.
So, what does this mean? Well, firstly it shows that both light and matter can be described with dots with cones of refraction within them. This also shows that while in matter, the cone of refraction has an angle of at least 30 degrees, the cone of refraction for light is very close to zero. Radio waves have the smallest cone of refraction and gamma rays have the highest. But even gamma rays have such a small cone of refraction that a scaled-up illustration showing just three dots would show them to be on a straight line.
I probably could say a lot of other things as well. However, my next task is to a) correct the images so that it isn’t just roughly correct, but precise enough that at least you can’t see the errors and b) show how the refractive cones increase in size when the same 25 dots are made to follow a helix instead of a circle.
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