Light Waves

Today we learned about light waves and got to play around with fun lasers. Light is the only thing we see and if the light waves don't hit you eyeballs you cannot see. We learned about the electromagnetic spectrum which is how different types of light waves are organized. From lowest frequency and longest waves to highest frequency and shortest waves goes: 1. radio waves + TV waves 2. Microwaves 3. Infra-Red 4. Visible Spectrum 5. Ultraviolet (UV) Radiation 6. X-Rays + Gamma Rays. I finally learned why the sky and ocean are blue. The sky is blue because of the scattering of light in the upper atmosphere while the ocean is blue because it absorbs red wavelengths. I kinda got confused at the end of the day when we learned about reflection. The law of reflection states that the angle of insidence will equal the angle of reflection relative to the normal. There are two types of reflection, specular (the image is the same as the object) and diffuse (when light is spread out).

We also learned about the primary colors of light which are red, green, and blue, white light which is the combination of all light colors, and shadows which are the absence of light. We made a color wheel which inclues green, red, blue, yellow (greed+red), magenta (red+blue), cyan (green+blue), and white (green+red+blue). Complementary Colors are 2 colors that when added together make white (they're opposite on the color wheel). That's why in the picture below of The Common Kings at The MayJah RayJah there are different color lights lighting the stage. Mr. Blake mentioned in class that often onstage performances have lightings of different colors because when all of the different colored lights combine they make white light. They have to make sure the proportions of light are just perfect though because otherwise the resulting light will have a tint and won't be white.