You wrote;
> ...Think about the idea (for me, it is a fact) that there is no such
> thing as visible light.
> Light, itself, is not visible. It has to interact with matter for
> matter to be visible but I can not see light. If light were visible,
> it would appear to us as a solid just as much as anything else does.
You are right on the money and I wondered how long before that came
up...<g>..
Somewhere, I don't remember the exact location, Keely says the sun is
DARK, that light can only manifest when it PERCUSSES against matter and
in a gaseous medium. I believe Rudolph Steiner and Goethe also said
this.
Several years ago, Tom Brown wrote some great articles about Goethe and
based on some of his own experiments with light, said he had contacted
NASA to ask if you could see light in space...he was told by a naive
secretary that no, a camera in space pointed at the sun showed only
darkness and that only if there was air in the camera was light
visible. Tom called back later to confirm that and was told it was
classified information.
He was told in that first call that the astronauts could not see stars
or the sun and that video and film cameras could not see them either.
I need to ask Tom to recall the exact story as it was amazing that they
would say or admit something like that. Anyone with electronics
experience or for that matter knowing about older CCDs and
photomultiplier based video cameras, knows that some of the older ones
'bloom' and will shut down when exposed to overly bright lights, thereby
making the picture go dark until it can recover. Most circuits these
days compensate almost instantly.
The reason is that a photomultiplier will give you anywhere from 100 to
1000 photons when it 'sees' just one photon (multiplier, get
it..<g>..)....so if they are looking at a normal or dim image and
suddenly exposed to something very bright, the PMT (photomultiplier
tube) will be amplifying so much that it just swamps the thing and it
takes a while to recover.
That is one possible explanation of a VIDEO camera, but this is supposed
to happen with film cameras also...that the film is dark...well hmm, if
you overexpose film with too much light, you get a black negative that
prints as a white image. If you take a picture of fireworks against a
night sky, the negative shows the fireworks as dark and the blackness as
clear film, but when printed you see a black background with the bright
flashes of the fireworks.
So if you took a picture of the sun, full frame with no black in the
image, you would have a black negative and a white positive. If the sun
is against a black background of course you will get a black image of
the sun with clear where the black of space is, which will print as a
bright solar image and a black background. nough of that.
So David, you are right on target, you CAN'T see light until it impinges
as reflected light from other objects to the rods and cones in your
eyes. Rods control contract (overall light and dark), cones control
frequency response...interesting eh? That successive diameters of many
nested waves (colors) would be received like a kids toy...colored hoops
thrown on to it with the lower frequency (longer wavelength hoops on the
bottom of the cone where it is widest, with the shorter wavelengths on
the upper part), red, green, yellow, blue, violet...you get the drift...
-- Jerry Wayne Decker / jdecker@keelynet.com http://keelynet.com / "From an Art to a Science" Voice : (214) 324-8741 / FAX : (214) 324-3501 KeelyNet - PO BOX 870716 - Mesquite - Republic of Texas - 75187