#electromagnetic spectrum

I just hit a huge milestone designing my giant pinball machine in Minecraft: the playfield is all laid out!

I'm calling the game Deep Field, and there's five primary objectives based on hitting different shots representing bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

IR: rollover switches Visible light: pop bumpers UV: captive ball X-rays: Drop targets Gamma rays: spinner

Do Now:

Electromagnetic Radiation exists on a spectrum, just like gender. Indeed, it can be divided into three segments (seen left to right in the image below)

Infrared - low energy, large wavelength (radio, microwave, heat)

Visible Light - the very short range of wavelengths that human eye cells can detect, (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet)

Ultraviolet - high energy, short wavelength (X-ray, gamma rays, and UV light obviously)

But which gender is more like which segment of the EM spectrum? Consider these three possible models.

1.

2.

3.

Example arguments below the cut

The electromagnetic spectrum is the entire range of electromagnetic radiation. It is organized by wavelength and frequency.

Some quick vocab:

Nanometer(nm)- a measurement of length in the metric system that is 1 billionth of a meter. (10^9m)

Ionizing radiation –radiation powerful enough to knock an electron away from an atom. This can change the chemical composition of material that it interacts with.

The EM spectrum is separated into several different categories which each have their own properties.

Note: The wavelengths below are just approximations.

Radio waves(discovered in 1888)

Wavelengths >1 mm

Longest wavelength/Low frequency/low energy

Used in things like am/fm radio, Mobile phones, and wireless computer networks.

Microwaves(predicted in 1864 by James Clark Maxwell, discovered in 1888 by Heinrich Hertz)

Wavelengths from 10^6 nm - 1 m

Used in microwaves and things such as wi-Fi or cell phone communications.

Infrared(discovered in 1800 by William Herschel)

Wavelengths from 780 – 1,000,000 nm

Invisible to the human eye, but can be detected by humans as heat. Can be used in things like thermal imaging to capture heat signatures, or TV remotes.

Visible light

Wavelengths between 380 – 700 nm

The only part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to us.

Wavelengths that help us to see colors. We also use visible light to transmit Data through optical fibers.

Ultraviolet(discovered in 1801 by Johann Willhelm Ritter)

Wavelengths between 100 - 400 nm

Divided into three regions called near UV, for UV, and extreme UV. The former being closest to visible light.

Energy from this category onward can be harmful to humans, as it could cause ionization.

X-rays(discovered in 1895 by Willhelm Conrad Roentgen)

Wavelengths from 0.01 – 10 nm

Used for a medical imaging and cancer treatments. Doctors use invisible electromagnetic beams that pass through the body to create an image of bones, organs and internal tissues.

Gamma rays(discovered in 1900 by Paul Villard)

Wavelengths <0.01nm

Shortest wavelength> High frequency> High energy

Gamma ray bursts occur in space and can release more energy than our sun can in its entire lifetime.

Gamma rays can also be used in cancer treatments, or for sterilization.

Fun fact: The sun emits light from the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

That’s all for today. See ya tomorrow!

(please someone get the reference)

"Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a 'sky' of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides."

(video source esa: "A solar flare is a tremendous explosion on the Sun that happens when energy stored in ‘twisted’ magnetic fields is suddenly released. In a matter of just a few minutes a solar flare heats material to many millions of degrees and produces bursts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays." - ESA)

"The discovery was enabled by one of Solar Orbiter's most detailed views of a large solar flare, observed during the spacecraft's 30 September 2024 close approach to the sun. It is described in a paper being published on Wednesday 21 January in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Solar flares are powerful explosions on the sun. They occur when energy stored in tangled magnetic fields is suddenly released through a process described as "reconnection." In a matter of minutes, criss-crossing magnetic field lines of opposite direction break and then reconnect. The newly reconnected field lines can quickly heat up and accelerate million-degree plasma, and even high-energy particles, away from the reconnection site, potentially creating a solar flare."

"High-resolution imagery from Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) zoomed in to features just a few hundred kilometers across in the sun's outer atmosphere (its corona), capturing changes every two seconds. Three other instruments—SPICE, STIX and PHI—analyzed a range of depths and temperature regimes, from the corona down to the sun's visible surface, or photosphere. Importantly, the observations enabled scientists to watch the buildup of events that led to the flare over the course of about 40 minutes.

"We were really very lucky to witness the precursor events of this large flare in such beautiful detail," says Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany, and lead author of the paper. "Such detailed high-cadence observations of a flare are not possible all the time because of the limited observational windows and because data like these take up so much memory space on the spacecraft's onboard computer. We really were in the right place at the right time to catch the fine details of this flare.""

"We didn't expect that the avalanche process could lead to such high energy particles," says Pradeep. "We still have a lot to explore in this process, but that would need even higher resolution X-ray imagery from future missions to really disentangle."

"This is one of the most exciting results from Solar Orbiter so far," says Miho Janvier, ESA's Solar Orbiter co-Project Scientist. "Solar Orbiter's observations unveil the central engine of a flare and emphasize the crucial role of an avalanche-like magnetic energy release mechanism at work. An interesting prospect is whether this mechanism happens in all flares, and on other flaring stars."

"These exciting observations, captured in incredible detail and almost moment by moment, allowed us to see how a sequence of small events cascaded into giant bursts of energy," says David Pontin of the University of Newcastle, Australia, who co-authored the paper."

What if you genetically modified a bacteria to produce saw filters (that somehow work even though they're made of carbon based proteins instead of copper??) and then can take it in as an input. Like could you remote control certain behavior?

Also what if you designed a general purpose bacterial which would create any protein chain you could need and outputs it into a liquid (with a way for you to extract it).

Tldr, what if you had a liquid that just, emitted radio waves... Signing bacteria! (Aka bacteria / liquid that jams signals around it)

Yes, I'm back with more ramblings about all the ways humans use the electromagnetic spectrum! Because turns out, you're rather reliant on it.

Phones - mobile phones, anyway - use radio waves to connect to each other (it's more complicated than direct phone-to-phone communication but the radio waves are the important part today!). Your wifi is also radio waves. GPS is also radio waves. I probably don't even need to look it up to tell you a radio is radio waves, but I did and they do.

So, humans communicate with each other and locate themselves by waving, in a way. I like that.