This column compliments last week's column in so far as it continues discussing the subject of the reversal of the spectrum, one of the greatest errors in empirical science, an error that incorporates a failure to understand the nature of light, a failure to understand the nature of heat, a failure to produce an accurate picture of an atom and a failure to induce concepts that consistently connect the production of heat and light to the atoms, the solid matter that produces the heat and light.
When I first encountered the notion of black body radiation in high school, I simply could not understand it. The first problem I had was with the disconnect, the fact that heat was studied independently of light. Anyone who has sat in front of a fire understands that heat and light are connected. Anyone that gives it any thought can come to the conclusion that our bodies evolved in an environment of sunlight, that the sunlight accomplishes two things, it allows us to see in the environment and it allows us to stay warm in the environment. As we are evolutionary creatures of our environment, we sense heat in one fashion and we sense light in another fashion. Just because our senses evolved to take advantage of two qualities of the electromagnetic spectrum, of which heat frequencies and light frequencies are a part, does not mean that they are not both one and the same thing in the reality that exists outside us.
However, heat is considered to radiate from heated bodies and it is considered to affect other bodies in accordance with the nature of those bodies. A mirror reflects light and is therefore said to not absorb either light or heat radiation. Glass, on the other hand, is transparent to light but not to heat. This has led to the notion that light and heat come into a greenhouse but only the light escapes.
This only demonstrates the illogic of empirical science's approach to disconnecting light from heat. A greenhouse gets hotter inside not because the heat can't escape, but because the light heats up the objects in the greenhouse. It does this by field replacing (see 02/19/05 column) the electrons in the solid objects within the greenhouse. The release of these electrons increases the number of electrons within the greenhouse and thus raises the temperature within the greenhouse. The greenhouse does not stay hot all night long. When the sun goes down, the field replacement of the light stops and the solid matter in the greenhouse recaptures the excess electrons. However, because light has broken down within the greenhouse, there are always more electrons than can be absorbed and the greenhouse stays warmer, the same effect that occurs on a cloudy evening.
Soot, which is black, is said to absorb both the heat and the light and thus soot will become warm in the sunlight.
The way empirical science lines up the spectrum, the longest frequency of light is red. The frequencies of light, and I continue to use frequency instead of wavelength simply because wavelength is a false conceptual notion, the frequencies of light, according to empirical science become shorter in colors, with orange the next shortest, then yellow shorter than orange and green shorter than yellow. Blue is, according to empirical science, the shortest frequency of all. When a substance absorbs radiation and becomes hot, it begins to itself radiate. We can't see this radiation at low frequencies, but we can feel it. The first radiation we can both feel and see is a very dark red. When we sit in front of a fire and the fire starts to burn, it burns red. As it gets hotter, it glows orange and then yellow. If we can get the fire's heat up to very high temperatures, it will start to glow white.
The interesting thing about this visible progression is the complete absence of green and blue. If the colors were organized according to the rules and laws of empirical science, we would expect to sit in the front of the fire and watch as the fire got progressively hotter, the red become orange, then yellow, then green, and then blue, passing into invisibility after it became a gorgeous shade of violet.
This, of course, doesn't happen.
The next puzzling feature of watching the fire get hotter is that it becomes white hot. According to the ancient lights of empirical knowledge, white light contains all colors. Therefore, something that is burning at a white-hot rate is also burning at all the degrees of lower temperature. This, of course, is puzzling only if white light contains all colors, and this notion of white light containing all colors would mean that a small segment of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum, the segment we happen to see, is a bundle of frequencies within the broad spectrum of frequencies, a notion that defies any form of rational thought.
If we look at how we perceive heat, we can go back to the radiation concept of heat and plot all of the heat we can feel radiating from something that we can't see. This is basically what black body radiation is, radiation that we can't see but which we can feel. If we plot black body radiation, we find that there is a whole lot of it in what is called the infrared, that area of the spectrum that produces heat but not light. As the heat becomes visible at red, the black body radiation curve peaks before it hits the red frequency. It actually begins to decline to meet the red frequency, which, because empirical science classifies it as the longest frequency, stands the tallest.
Now that the graph has colors on it, the red frequency dominates, and with the height of the frequencies decline with color, the yellow to the left of the red is shorter, the orange to the left of the yellow is shorter still, the green to the left of the yellow is even shorter and the blue is the shortest of all, with the ultraviolet to the left of the blue trailing off into invisibility.
Because we know by watching the fire that it glows red, then orange and then yellow, we might be a little puzzled by the fact that orange is a shorter frequency than yellow. But we really get flummoxed when we note that instead of the black body, or the heat curve continuing to rise the hotter the temperatures get, as represented by color, the black body curve declines with the increase in frequency.
This presents us with a chart that has all the heat in the invisible realm to the right of red, which means it is extremely low frequency radiation. It begins to increase in frequency as it goes from red to yellow, but then it simply ceases to be a factor when it enters the realm of the green and the blue.
In other words, the normal expectation, that the hotter the fire burns, the hotter the radiation, is not empirically true when plotted with the empirical line-up of the light spectrum, with blue the shortest frequency and red the longest. In fact, we have a whole lot of heat where there is no color and very little heat where there is some color, and then no heat where there should be a lot of heat if the colors are ordered properly.
Baconian analysis would require that we reevaluate the order of the colors in accordance with the newly acquired understanding of heat absorption. However, Newtonian analysis rules that the line-up of the colors are correct because it is an empirically established law and therefore, there must be something that empirical science hasn't discovered to explain the discrepancy.
Well, empirical science, based on fantasy rather than reality, can always come up with explanations to fill the gaps when its fantasies collide, and this particular gap was filled with the notion that when the radiation reaches a certain intensity, it starts to combine, in effect, reducing its frequency. The resulting equation, Planck's constant, describes the nature of these "quanta." Once the nature of the quanta was determined, the mechanics of light production came clear in the form of quantum mechanics. The little electrons that orbit the nuclei of atoms bounce up and down in orbit as they become excited, releasing quanta of energy that are the heat and light we experience.
All this hooey can be avoided simply by reversing the spectrum. Reversing the spectrum to its proper order, with yellow the shortest frequency, orange the next longest, with red, green and blue following provides a curve that reflects reality. All the empty black body space to the right of the colors is now filled with blue and green, which are not visible but which can be felt as heat. The heat curve, which is plotted to the colors, follows with the new arrangement of colors. If blocks representing the frequency's colors are plotted to increase with frequency, then the shortest on the right is blue and color blocks rise with green, red, orange, and yellow. That's exactly what the heat curve, plotted to rise with temperature, does, bringing the color of frequency and heat into agreement.
This, unfortunately, eliminates the need to create the fantasy of quantum mechanics and all the reputations and salaries it produces. Thus, we'll continue to live in our fantasy world until the Earth grows cold and begins to take on the appearance of its moon and we all die fighting for diminishing resources, the subject of the next column.
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