User talk:Paine Ellsworth/Light's nature
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A few facts: the Sun is a star, one of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun emits light energy that drenches the Earth, your part of the Earth, everyday. The Earth makes one full turn around the Sun each year, and we know that about the same amount of light hits the Earth in the summer, the winter, in fall and in spring, which leads us to know that the Sun, and in fact all of the stars we can see, emit light in all directions.
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- Thought I'd write this page to emphasize something in another unarticle in a section entitled Nature of light. To save time that section is repeated here.
Just had a thought about light that I've never read anywhere. The vast majority of light in the Universe is actually invisible and goes unseen by all of us. Think about it. We look up at the stars and, assuming that our vision is unimpaired and not obstructed, we see pinpoints of light. Each light is a star (or planet). Each star emits light and other radiations in all directions; however, the only light we see is the light that comes directly to our eyes. That's worth a repeat: the only light we see are two little rays of light that come directly to our eyes. All the other light emitted by the stars in all other directions is invisible to us!
If I were in New York and you were in California, and we look up at the full Moon one night, we see pretty much the same Moon. It's in a different position in the sky, but it's the same moonlight, right? Wrong. The source light from the Sun takes about 8 minutes to get to the Moon, bounces off the surface of the Moon, and then takes about a second and a half to get to our eyes. The light you see is made up of different rays than the light I see. I can't see the light rays you see, and you can't see the light rays I see. Heck, if you and I were standing together in the middle of the Sahara desert looking up at the full Moon, the same would be true. If you look over at the area between me and the Moon, you cannot see the rays of light from the Moon that I see. That light is invisible to you. So the vast majority of light goes in all other directions and those light rays are invisible to us! Yo, Jimbo! Do you see the light?
And yet, the only light we can actually see is the light that precisely targets our eyes. You cannot see the light that targets my eyes, and I cannot see the light that targets your eyes. Neither of us can see the light that is given off by a star in all directions other than the direction that targets our eyes. It is absolutely astounding to me that the vast majority of light in the Universe is invisible to me!... to us!... to every living creature we know that has eyes to see!