Light and Energy Levels

Light is one thing that is hard to grasp on to. Light is a very unique and complex. When dealing with colors there are many different things to look at. We are going to look at what makes colors appear the color they do, and is light a wave or a particle. There's a lot of questions being answered in this one blog so be ready to learn!

Color is formed all around us, but what makes each object change into the colors that they are. As light hits the object it either absorbs or reflects the colors that hits the object. So when an object appears yellow that means the object is able to absorb all other energy levels exept yellow which is then reflected creating color. Imagine if they were only able to absorb or deflect colors. If objects did this then we would live in a black and white world. So this is pretty incredible how much this matters in the world. In class we did many different experiments involving light. We looked through sprectascopes and we could then tell which colors were deflected and which colors were absorbed. It was ineresting being able to see why each color was the way they were. Colors are different levels of energy ranging from red being the lowest to purple being the highest.


To measure the energy of a wave you use the frequency. The higher frequency the wave has the more energy it has. As you can see purple has a high frequency when red has a low frequency.



So is light a wave or a particle? The answer is both believe it or not. Light beaves as a wave sometimes and a particle sometimes. If you set up two labs you will see that it has been proven to behave as both.

To start I will start with light behaving as a wave.

In this image you can tell that as light is shot through two slits then it expands to three slits because the wave frequencies will cancel out the light or combine to create a bigger wave. This shows that light is able to behave as a wave.

Now I will talk about how light also behaves as a particle.

In this experiment you can see the particles of light flying through the slits and hitting the wall. As you can see there is a clear pattern occurring along the wall. This shows that light behaves as particles as passes through two slits and the electrons are recorded on the wall.