Recent content by peter.ell

Because energy cannot be destroyed, when waves interfere destructively the energy doesn't really disappear, it's simply redistributed to areas of constructive interference, right? But isn't this energy redistribution instantaneous?

Thank you. I appreciate your answer, it was very helpful. All the best!

After reading about how dithering works for created the sense of a larger range of colors from a small color palette, it makes sense how it works, but how in the world do computers figure out how to dither an image so that it looks correct to us? Is the fact that blue and red combined create...

I know about the law of conservation of energy, and I understand interference effects conceptually, but when I put the two together I'm a little confused. I know that the energy of light must simply by transformed in destructive interference...but where does it go and how? If the...

It's actually because glass is transparent to visible light, which is absorbed by the materials inside your car and then that light is re-radiated at a longer wavelength--IR. This IR is then trapped inside of the car because the glass windows keep it in.

According to my understand of what makes something transparent, it's because a given wavelength of light doesn't have sufficient energy to raise the electrons in a material to a higher energy level, so the photons are not absorbed and continue on. This explains why glass is transparent for...

I was wondering what occurs when light encounters a slit that happens to be smaller than the wavelength of light that's trying to go through it. Does it just reflect back, does part of it go through thereby making the light have a shorter wavelength that matches the slit, what actually...

I completely understand the effects of parallax as well as perspective...intuitively; but I can't seem to explain them to a particularly inquisitive child I'm tutoring. He wants to know, in conceptual terms, why objects in the distance like the moon seem to move in the same direction as you...

Thank you all for the great, helpful answers. You're right, I've never taken a class in quantum physics, but I'd love to. In the mean time, let me just see if I understand all of this: Light acts as both a particle and a wave, but a single light wave is not the same as a single photon. A...

I am very curious as to why the etched lines running between components on a printed circuit board run the indirect paths they do. Looking at one now, I notice that many of the etched lines connecting components make all sorts of turns as if they were navigating around something...but nothing...

I am just curious how a microprocessor is able to actually process data. A serious of voltage variations corresponding to bits flows into it, but how does the inanimate slab of etched silicon "know" how to act on it and what to do with it? I am just in awe that computers can even work at all...

I am a very conceptual kind of person and I'm trying to understand refraction, but after all my reading I'm still having some fundamental gaps that are preventing me from fully grasping it. (All of these questions are especially pertaining to how light waves refract.) Here's what I don't...

Waves in general have three properties: frequency (related to wavelength), amplitude, and speed. When referring to light as a wave, it's wavelength and speed are always referenced but never its amplitude, and I was wondering if light has a fixed amplitude for all wavelengths or if it changes...

I've been reading up on photolithography trying to understand how processors with sub-wavelength features can be made through photolithography, but I just don't get it. Can someone please help me by explaining in a conceptual way how light with a wavelength of, say, 200nm can be used to make...

I was wondering what occurs when a diffraction grating is produced with features smaller than a wavelength of visible light. If the pits in a CD were made to be only a few tens of nanometers wide, what would we see?