Russellian Science: Light and the Extreme Spectrum

The electromagnetic spectrum, an immense scale used to measure the wavelengths of all kinds of radiation. At one end, our radio waves, with the longest wavelengths. At the other end, our gamma rays, with the shortest, in between the other bands, including visible light, which is such a tiny fraction of the whole, it's difficult to imagine. How small is the visible spectrum? If you had a real-of-movie film, representing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, stretching 2,500 miles from California to Alaska. The section containing the visible spectrum would fall somewhere in the middle, near the University of Washington. The first thing that I want to do is to make sure that the light is in the middle of the spectrum. This frame is the whole visible spectrum. It is one frame and over 2,000 miles of tape, and it's everything that the human eye can see. The importance of this frame is that stars emit almost all of their light in this part of the spectrum. And even though the light is visible, it still contains hidden tools. The secrets are in the spectrum itself. The visible light in this lamp comes from hydrogen gas, excited by electricity to form a glowing plasma, similar to what happens in an abula. By viewing the lamp through a diffraction grating, we can split the light up into three narrow lines on the spectrum. A virtual fingerprint of light unique to hydrogen alone. So in the spectrum, you see three features. One is red, one is a light blue, and the other is a deep blue. This pattern of wavelengths is absolutely unique to hydrogen, and there's no way to confuse hydrogen in the spectrum with any other element.