Thursday, May 24, 2007

Are All Scientists Blind?

When it comes to light, which separates the blind from the seeing, science is totally blind, so blind, in fact, that it costs billions of extra dollars to come up with technology dealing with light, and that technology, I’m thinking the blue laser and LED, only occurs when an inventor throws out the scientific view and embarks on the opposite.
There was a time, back before Newton extended his influence to the entire world, that people held a reasonable view of light. While no one knew what light was, and no one even bothered to ask the question, how is light produced, scientists spent their time arguing whether light was a particle or a wave, with Christiaan Huygens holding mental sway through much of the 17th century with his view that light was a wave.
Other than arguing the light particle nature of light, color was taken for granted. Light struck an object and the properties of the object changed the light and therefore changed its color.
I mentioned briefly in my entries on gravity that science is pretty arrogant about light. It continually claims that humans are animals that hold no special place in the universe, that we are an accident of chance, that we adapt to nature. Yet when it comes to light, humans hold a very special position. While all of our thoughts about color are inherited from Newton, a man who lived hundreds of years before the discovery of the range of electromagnetic frequencies, Newton’s thought is stamped on the one portion of the range of frequencies that affect us most, color.
Looking at any frequency chart, we can see the frequencies getting smaller on a regular basis, and as they get smaller, they have different characteristics and are adaptable to different uses. However, when it comes to light, we don’t have a series of frequencies. With light, for some reason, we have a bundled frequency. And, while humans are just an accident of the universe, that bundled frequency just happens to be the one that allows us to see color. It’s as if the universe created a whole range of frequencies, with one special bundled frequency, and we are the ones the universe created the bundled frequency for. Evolutionists could argue, if forced to face the fact that white light is the only frequency in the entire range of electromagnetic frequencies that is many frequencies bundled together, that our eye evolved to see the bundled frequencies. But our eye could only evolve to see the bundled frequencies in their unbundled form, as green leaves, blue sky, brown dirt.
Which brings us to the basic question. Did nature bundle the frequencies, or did we bundle the frequencies?
Using the term bundled is just a substitute for the scientific fiction that white light contains all colors, or to put it another way, all frequency colors are contained in the frequency of white light. I’m certainly no artist, but I do know that there are millions of colors, or at least that’s what my computer monitor claims it can resolve. With white light containing all colors, when white light strikes the surface of a leaf, the leaf absorbs millions of colors and only reflects the green color back (of course, if the leaves are changing, every section of the leaf is absorbing millions of colors and reflecting a different one so we see the symphony of colors that is fall).
This is really a complex thing for nature to develop when all she had to do was alter the frequency of the white light with the nature of the material it was bouncing off. But Newton “proved” that white light contained all colors. He passed light through a prism, which broke white light into the color frequencies, then recombined the color frequencies to come up with white light.
How this proves white light contains all color frequencies escapes my ability to discern the verities of scientific dogma, but the consequences, turning pigment into something that absorbs, rather than reflects, light doesn’t. Instead of matter reflecting light, it is now absorbing all sorts of frequencies and reflecting only the color frequency we see.
Actually, I can go to the color wheel on my computer and disprove Mr. Newton. The color wheel uses the computer's ability to combine color frequencies to produce all sorts of colors, millions of them. What is this thing called color adding? It’s the same thing Newton did when he recombined all color frequencies. He increased the frequency of the reflected light, in Newton’s case back to the white frequency, in my computer's case, any frequency I want.
Frequency adding has produced a very accurate test for color blindness, which shows a deficit of either red or green. As we all know, combining red and green produces yellow, another case of frequency adding. This fact has been incorporated into the anomaloscope, a device that allows a viewer to see half a yellow disk with one eye, and the other half of the disk, which is a combination of red and green, with the other eye. Using a calibrated knob, the viewer adjusts the knob until the adjustable half of the disk is the same yellow color as the yellow half of the disk. The calibration tells the tester what portion of red and green it took to produce the yellow frequency.
The anomaloscope not only works to demonstrate color adding (as well as determine the type of colorblindness involved), it disproves another of Mr. Newton’s unfounded notions, a notion that is taken as gospel today, one that cripples technology. Newton determined that light was lined up the way it came out of the prism. This is the famous Roy G. Biv notion, where we have light emerging in order of red, orange, yellow, blue and so forth (could never figure out what the indigo and violet were doing in there).
On a practical basis, we are only concerned with red, yellow, green and blue. After much hoop-de-do, science decided that red was the longest wave (science still thinks of light in terms of water), with blue the shortest wave. In my lexicon, that would translate into red being the longest frequency, blue the shortest.
How many ways is this wrong?
For starters, any idiot knows that heat translates into frequency. The shorter the frequency, the more it’s going to scramble your cells. Radiation 101. Scientists can simply turn on their Bunsen Burners, assuming the last time they saw one wasn’t in college, and notice the color of the flame. The inner cone is blue, and its temperature is about 500ºC. Proceeding to the outer cone, the red flame is graded from 500ºC to 950ºC, when it starts to turn yellow, where it stays till it reaches 1450C at the peak of the outer cone and turns, what else, white. Blue is clearly the longer frequency, with red the shorter. But according to this, yellow is even shorter than red.
Returning to the anomaloscope, the colorblind viewer sees a yellow half of the disk and something other than yellow, which is adjusted until it is yellow. The adjustment changes the mixture of red and green. If we go back to Roy G. Biv, where does yellow fall in this interpretation of the lineup of frequencies?
It falls between red and green!
If the viewer is deficient in seeing red or green, or both, how is it he can see the yellow side of the disk without any adjustment? And how is it that, after color adding, he can see yellow on both sides of the disk? The simple answer, in fact, the only answer, is that yellow has a higher frequency than either red or green.
Before Newton’s color folly, people sensibly thought that the light moving through the prism was being changed (they didn’t understand what light was, so they didn’t know how it might be changing) by the glass in the prism, with the further the light traveled in the prism, the bigger the change. If we examine light’s path through a prism, we can see clearly that yellow travels the shortest distance. Thus, in modern day lingo, at least in my lingo, the white light’s frequency has been reduced the least at this point. Red and green come out of the prism on either side of yellow, with the red traveling a slightly shorter distance than the green, so this put the frequency lineup yellow, the longest, then red, then green, then, traveling the furthest, blue.
How scientists can’t see what’s right in front of their eyes demonstrates the ideological blindness science operates in. With disciplines fracturing basic scientific knowledge, educated scientists learn the basics by rote, gravity is a property of mass, white light contains all color, light is lined up the way it comes out of the prism, and because these statements are attributed to the scientific deity, Newton, a deity who can never be questioned, scientists go through life parroting this mindless tripe back and forth to each other and out to us, the great unwashed.
Unfortunately, engineers soak this stuff up and, when it comes to searching for technological improvements, are themselves blinded by mindless ideology. Take the laser. The first laser produced red light. If red is the longest frequency, what the heck are the chances that experimental fishing would stumble upon the weakest laser around. It’s simply more logical to conclude, trial and error is going to stumble over the laser that’s the easiest to produce, the laser with the highest energy content. But not to scientists and the engineers (for one, the scientists were too busy attempting to take credit from the engineers).
While a blue laser was sought, the blue LED was much more critical. If light arrays were to be constructed from LEDs, blue would be needed along with red and green, the second laser to be found, in order to produce the millions of colors necessary to realistic viewing. The hunt was on. Billions of dollars was spent looking for something that would produce the shorter wavelength blue LED. After a decade, during which several possible materials were ruled out because they would only produce longer frequencies, a maverick named Shuji Nakamura said the heck with theory, let’s just start working by trial and error on the materials considered to be unworthy of the time. He had a blue LED before anyone else could blink an eye, and, because he was smart, no scientist could touch him.
But that’s not where the blue LED/Laser story ends. As soon as the blue LED was proven, the blue laser followed quickly behind. Perhaps you have purchased a new piece of electronic equipment in the last year or two. I remember when I had a bank of recorders that, when I turned the lights out at night, made the room look like a Christmas tree with all the red indicator lights. I shuddered at the electronic leakage this was producing, along with the cost. While there’s nothing we can do about the cost of indicator lights on equipment that has to stay on, all of a sudden, the color is changing from red to blue. Now when I buy a piece of electronic equipment, at least one that is high end, it has blue LEDs. Why? Because the blue LEDs use less electricity than the red LEDs. Why? Because the blue LEDs are a longer frequency than the red LEDs, and thus take less electricity to produce.
But the real payoff is for the recording industry. Disks recorded with blue lasers hold considerably more information than disks recorded with red lasers. Pretty soon, all of our DVD players will be using blue lasers to read disks. Why does a blue laser, the so-called shorter frequency, access so much more information than the supposedly longer frequency red laser? Because the longer the frequency, the less intrusive it is, and the less intrusive it is, the smaller area of information it can access. That means the blue laser, accessing more information, is less intrusive than the red laser, and therefore a longer frequency than the red laser.
But why stop in the laboratory, or in technological achievement, to see just how blind scientists are? Why not just step out into one of the glorious Pacific sunsets? Ask scientists why the sky is blue, and they’ll respond that the atmosphere is scattering the blue wavelength so that it become visible. The red and yellow, why they pass right through undisturbed because they are longer frequencies.
Does this sound logical? Logical would be if the longest frequency was scattered first. Is there a way to demonstrate this? Simply wait until the light has more atmosphere to pass through. This occurs as the sun sets and the sunlight we see is no longer the shortest distance, straight up, but now passes through many layers of atmosphere as the sun moves lower on the horizon. What happens? If the atmosphere is cloudless, we'll see a yellow sun. The red is being scattered, but it is lost in the darkening sky. However, if the atmosphere has clouds, those clouds will pick up the scattered red light and provide dazzling sunsets, with yellow and red, and every hue in between. If this were happening according to science's color lineup, a little bit of atmosphere couldn't scatter the longer wavelengths, but a lot of atmosphere could. It's not logic, it’s the reverse of logic.
In fact, blue, the longest frequency, scatters first when the sun is overhead, and as the sun sets and has to pass through more layers of atmosphere, it starts to scatter the next shortest, red, then the shortest of all, yellow, producing the incredible, multicolor sunsets we enjoy. What happened to green in all of this? Well, there is an unusual effect called a green flash that has been reported off and on, but it is very rare. Why? In my opinion, the transition from blue to green is subtle, whereas the transition from blue to red is startling.
But let’s assume our scientists, after a day on the links, and an even longer stay at the 19th hole, are too snookered to even see the sunset, and thus can be excused for their blindness. We can always turn to day-to-day life to see if they are aware of anything. While there are probably as many insurance agents as there are scientists, the insurance agents aren’t as blind as the scientists. They do studies of accidents and car colors. Guess what car gets hit the most: A blue car. Guess what car gets hit the least: a yellow car. Wonder if it has something to do with visibility, which couldn't possibly have anything to do with frequency, could it?
Sure it does! When was the last time you saw a blue fire engine? They’re traditionally red. What color are safety experts starting to paint them? Yellow. These fools must know something scientists don’t, but don’t try and tell a scientist that because, by definition, no one knows what a scientist knows.
So we’ll muddle on through our ignorant lives, making improvements to our electronics, increasing our safety, and enjoying our sunsets, in spite of what blind scientists mindlessly repeat as they stumble through life reaping tremendous rewards for providing nothing.

3 comments:

Will said...

You seem to be using wavelength and frequency interchangeably throughout this post. This made things a bit confusing

Will said...

Also, one thing is factually wrong. Blue LEDs draw MORE power than red. Look at blue LED vs. red LED specs in any electronics catalog. Or buy a red and blue LED and connect them in parallel. The red will light and the blue won't.

Peter Bros said...

Good point Will, but power need does not necessarily reflect frequency as here, where the 1st generation blue LED can be analogized to the power mad 80s computers, and the later generation red LED, today’s power stingy laptops. It’s my understanding that each color LED requires a different level of power to light it. Right now, red LEDs operate the most efficiently at a lower power starting point than the blue. That’s why we only see blue LEDs on high-end equipment. However, as subsequent generations of blue LEDs reduce the base power needed to light, we’ll see a massive sweep from red to blue. If we don’t, well, won’t be the first time I get caught with my pants down. As to frequency and wave, I simply have no truck with the wave concept, yet live in a world that’s satiated with it. I try to carefully juggle the two so that a reader who has been taught to think only in waves understands my point of view. I don’t always succeed.

By the way, the inventor of the blue LED used to have his visualization of the discovery on his website. While I don’t think its on his site anymore, I’ve always been fascinated by it because it’s one graphic that’s worth about a billion words.

Notice in the graphic, the blue spike equals the black body radiation science made up to account for the blue frequency heat, heat which is invisible to science because it has been placed to the left of red. Combine this with the Bunsen burner heat cone, where the blue inner cone is the coolest, the yellow outer cone the hottest.

Peter