One of the most difficult realizations I ever faced involved the star classification charts made up by astronomers to convey their supposed deep understanding of the universe. I cover this in great detail in Transparent Realities, the 10th Volume of The Copernican Series, the series' ideography that is due out sometime in 2008. The reason that the realization involving the star chart scheme was so difficult was that I still trusted empirical science. I still thought that the scientific method could turn conceptual fantasies into factual realities. As a result, I had invested quite a bit of time, and when I say quite a bit, I mean years, attempting to square the star charts, with its red giants and white dwarfs and green these and orange thats into the explanations for force and motion that I had developed. After failing in attempt after attempt, it dawned on me that it wasn't my attempts that were bad, it was what I was trying to fit into those attempts, the star charts, that were bad, and once I realized that, a whole lot of reality became crystal clear.
Once burned, bad on you, twice burned, bad on me, as the saying goes, should have prepared me for the problems I would face when I set out to unify light, electricity and magnetism in the 6th Volume of the Series, Light. But the notion that the spectrum was Roy G. Biv had been so ingrained into my mind since 9th grade chemistry, that it didn't even dawn on me it might be like the star charts, just made-up stuff. Thus, when I kept bumping into consistency problems in writing Light, and those consistency problems kept coming back to color, I decided to integrate the color line-up, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet into the framework of light, electricity and magnetism if it took enough concentration to split my head open. I had a similar experience when I set out to discover how it was that the shape of a table that existed outside our mind could get inside our mind, and it had taken three days staring at a table to figure that one out, with the result being a series of headaches that lasted for years.
For the spectrum task, I took the opportunity of an overnight flight to London to confront the problem. Before the flight, I went to our scientific bookstore and poured through the dozens of volumes dealing with light, looking for one that had a multitude of effects set forth. I finally settled on M. G. J. Minnaert's Light and Color in the Outdoors, published by Springer-Verlag in 1974. This book has 273 descriptions of color phenomena observed in nature. I was determined to get through all 273 by the time the plane touched down at Heathrow, and I was determined to have integrated color into my synthesis by that time or I would stay on the plane till it flew back to the States.
After about four hours, I was ready to jump out the window. Nothing seemed to fit, and it wasn't only a fit into my synthesis of light, electricity and magnetism, which I had forgotten about a quarter of the way into the book. What didn't seem to fit was the descriptions of light in the environment and my old friend, Roy G. Biv. Could it possibly be, I wondered, that empirical science had reversed the colors, that in fact blue wasn't the shortest frequency, but the longest, and red wasn't the longest frequency, but the shortest?
When I put the book down and thought about this mind-bending notion, it dawned on me that I had long since abandoned the notion that light was a wave, having concluded for purposes of syntheses that it was a frequency. I then began to wonder where the notion of Roy G. Biv came from and I realized that the color scheme was simply the product of the way light came out of a prism. Knowing that early empiricists had thought the spectrum reversed, I could reverse it in my mind and still not square it with what I had read in the book, though.
Then I realized that light slowed down when it entered a medium and that the prism was a medium. Why shouldn't the glass of the prism alter the frequency of the light? Checking this against the colors that emerged from the prism demonstrated that, using white light as the source of light entering the prism, the light that traveled through the shortest amount of glass emerged as yellow, the next shortest, ignoring orange, as red, with the light that traveled the longest through the prism emerging as blue and the next longest as green. Using the primary colors as a guide, then, this meant that the light with the highest frequency, the shortest wavelength in empirical misconception, was yellow, with red following and blue having the longest frequency, or wavelength.
Strangely enough, this was the view prior to Newton, who came up with the notion that white light is made up of all colors. Newton came to this conclusion by taking a second prism and inverting it in front of the first. This had the effect of reversing the splitting of the light, turning the colors the first prism produced back into white light. The experiment today, although empirically followed, is a relic to the fact that adding frequencies results in an increased frequency and thus recombining the colors results in white light, which is the basis of our television screens and computer monitors. In addition, Newton had no knowledge of the range of electromagnetic frequencies.
Believing that white light is made up of all colors in the context of the electromagnetic spectrum would mean that one small portion of that spectrum, the total range of frequencies that could be generated by natural and artificial means, the small portion of the range of frequencies that we could actually see with our eyes, was unique. This small segment of the spectrum, if all those lawmakers of yore were right, lawmakers who were ignorant of even the most rudimentary aspects of reality, aspects like atoms and electricity and the electric light bulb, not to mention TV and computer screens, this little segment of the spectrum happened to be bundled together into an independent segment. The entire range of frequencies went from long to short, but when it came to light, a group of frequencies was bundled together so that when it was passed through a spectrum, it came apart into its separate frequencies.
The challenge on the flight, as the plane approached London was to come to terms with the possibility that empirical science had the spectrum essentially reversed. Realizing that the spectrum was lined up yellow, red, green and blue, with yellow the shortest frequency and blue the longest had me wandering around in a daze of thought for the entire two weeks I was in England.
Since then, of course, it has become evident that red and blue have been reversed, and that yellow is the shortest frequency. Simple brightness would lead even the most obtuse person to this result when faced with practical applications. We ran around for years in red fire engines until someone noticed that yellow fire engines were much more visible than red ones. We started to air condition cars and found that windows neutralized the effect of the air conditioning. Engineers discovered they could eliminate infrared, heat carrying frequencies, without affecting visibility, something that would have been impossible to do if those frequencies were the shortest frequencies because eliminating the shortest frequencies would have involved eliminating the light needed to see the road.
The most interesting technological blocks that reversing the spectrum, and the most expensive, involved the search for the blue laser and the blue Light Emitting Diode, or LED. When the laser was first put into general production, we didn't go into the grocery store and see a blue light scanning our groceries. We didn't point at our chart with blue beams of light. We scanned our groceries with red lasers and used red pointers.
Someone, somewhere, should have realized immediately that the first lasers to be invented must have been the result of manipulating high energy levels. When it comes to producing coherent light, it stands to reason that the light we will be able to produce with early technology is the most energetic light. When it came time to produce a blue laser, or a blue LED, if the frequency was stronger than the red, then it should have been much easier to produce a blue laser than a red laser.
The problem was, no one could figure out how to produce either a blue laser or a blue LED. There were strong technological reasons to do both. Because blue is a primary color, a blue LED was needed to produce inexpensive, full color light displays for things like billboards. But a blue laser was an even greater prize. Compact Disk readers had been produced using red lasers. However, if a CD reader could be produced using a blue laser, the CD could contain a vastly increased amount of information in the same area.
Once again, someone, somewhere should have sat down and said, wait a minute, if blue is a shorter wavelength than red, then how could it read more than red. The logical conclusion would be that the weaker frequency could read smaller sectors than the stronger frequency, and therefore red must be the stronger frequency.
But no, engineers spent billions of dollars looking for a blue laser and blue LED on the "other" side of the spectrum. It took one lone researcher, Shuji Nakamura, with a budget in the thousands of dollars, to come up with the blue laser, with the LED quickly following the discovery of the technology. Guess where the blue laser wavelength is placed? See for yourself at http://www.eurotechnology.com/bluelaser/blueslide9.html. Because empirical facts can't trump reality, the blue laser's wavelength towers above all others, even though it's still placed on the short frequency side of the chart.
An even more telling technological confirmation that empirical science has reversed red and blue in the spectrum is the start-up Faveon's new X3 CMOS or complementary metal oxide semiconductor chip for use in cameras. Typically, digital cameras collect images using the three primary color dots, red, green and blue. Notice the line-up with Roy G. Biv's initials, RGB. Traditionally, these dots are placed in clusters side-by-side. Red light is absorbed by the red dot, green by the green and blue by the blue. Each color rejects the other colors. In theory, however, the dots could be lined up one on top of the other. With the empirical RGB, this would mean putting the red dot facing the light source. The red dot would absorb the lower frequency red and allow the green and blue to pass. Then the green dot would absorb the green frequency allowing the stronger blue frequency to pass. Finally, the blue dot would absorb the remaining blue frequency.
Well, while absolutely perfect in theory, it wouldn't work in reality.
Until that is, Faveon decided to turn the stack around and let the blue dot face the light source. All of a sudden, workable technology emerged, with the three stacked dots picking up their assigned colors.
This, of course, could only be possible if the blue dot was filtering out the weaker blue frequency, allowing the stronger green and red frequencies to pass, then the green was absorbing the green frequency allowing the still stronger red frequency to pass, and finally the strongest frequency, red, was absorbed.
And thus is the contribution of empirical science, which believes that it can turn fantasies into facts regardless of reality.
We evolve better technology in spite of empirical science, not as a result of its rabid delusions.
POSTSCRIPT 8/06: I occasionally go through sales catalogs, the type you get dozens of in the mail, to see the latest innovations. In one I found something that demonstrates that practical engineers don't even give lip service to Newton's notion that white light contains all colors and the colors are lined up the way the come out of the prism, with blue the shortest, red the longest, and yellow closer to red than to blue. The innovation was golf ball finding glasses. The blurb says the lenses block out 90% of the longer (darker) frequencies, and lets only the shortest frequencies in. What does it say the shortest frequencies are? White and yellow.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com