Where does the light go when you turn off its source?
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Isnt it conserved? Why cant you see it anymore?
It gets absorbed and reemitted by the walls of the room. Its reemitted as infrared light, due to the temperature of the walls. Eventually it just all ends up as heat.
The answer to the question "where did the energy go?" is "heat" 99% of the time.
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It gets absorbed and reemitted by the walls of the room. Its reemitted as infrared light, due to the temperature of the walls. Eventually it just all ends up as heat.
The answer to the question "where did the energy go?" is "heat" 99% of the time.
And the remaining 1% of the time it is, "It excited an electron in this atom into a higher state, which will drop down later and emit some radiation, which will then hit something and then be converted to heat."
Every once in a blue moon it's, "It overloaded this atom's nucleus and now that atom is two atoms. And some heat." Those are always fun times.
But at the end of the day the answer is always heat... eventually.
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And the remaining 1% of the time it is, "It excited an electron in this atom into a higher state, which will drop down later and emit some radiation, which will then hit something and then be converted to heat."
Every once in a blue moon it's, "It overloaded this atom's nucleus and now that atom is two atoms. And some heat." Those are always fun times.
But at the end of the day the answer is always heat... eventually.
You're forgetting about "a thing moved up" and "some atoms are now attached to eachother differently"
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Isnt it conserved? Why cant you see it anymore?
@[email protected] [email protected]
In order to understand what happens with the light from our earthly shelters, one needs to look up. See those stars shining all across the night sky? Those celestial bodies aren't where we see them, and many of them are long gone. So we don't see the stars, we see their "ghosts", compelled to physically wander through the spacetime continuum.
Roughly speaking, EM radiation (and, by extension, visible light) travels indefinitely to the far reaches of cosmos once it's emitted. It'll definitely decay and become fainter and fainter (Inverse Square Law), eventually blending with other faint signals also scattered and wandering through the space. We call it "noise", which is nothing but the sum of all cosmic EM activity that once happened since the dawn of time, especially (but not limited to) that of Big Bang, as "Cosmic Microwave Background", which is still around (it's just that our home equipment, as digital sets, are designed to ignore such noise, but people used to be able to tune into it with the early analog TV and radio receptors).
Now, there's a maxim from Hermeticism that says "As above, so below": just as we see the past from cosmos whenever we look at the skies, some hypotethical extraterrestrial civilization at hundreds of thousands of light-years from here would see (supposing they exist and supposing that they got highly advanced optics) a Pale Blue Dot with some minuscule flame spots on its surface, the bonfires once lit by Homo erectus when they began tinkering with fire. Those extraterrestrials won't see the Earth as it currently is relative to the Sun, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Milky Way, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Laniakea.
Those extraterrestrials definitely won't see our desperate signals begging for them to beam us up (from the former Arecibo transmission all the way to someone lonely blinking their home lights right now desperately trying to call the extraterrestrial attention): we're all screaming to the void, and the void screams back as a silent noise from long-gone celestial bodies. The cosmos is a big cemetery where ghosts are hauntingly compelled to roam around without getting anywhere (still they sometimes stumble upon other ghosts, when energy is absorbed by all sorts of cosmic matter both here and out there).
In the end, this is what happens with your home light every time you turn it off: it becomes some kind of "electromagnetic ghost" electrically "summoned" in your room and unleashed to the outer space, not to haunt, but to be haunted and devoured by the ineffable darkness of the abyss, where it will spend the eternity going everywhere to reach nowhere... -
You're forgetting about "a thing moved up" and "some atoms are now attached to eachother differently"
What brand light switches are you guys using?
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What brand light switches are you guys using?
AZ-5 switches.
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@[email protected] [email protected]
In order to understand what happens with the light from our earthly shelters, one needs to look up. See those stars shining all across the night sky? Those celestial bodies aren't where we see them, and many of them are long gone. So we don't see the stars, we see their "ghosts", compelled to physically wander through the spacetime continuum.
Roughly speaking, EM radiation (and, by extension, visible light) travels indefinitely to the far reaches of cosmos once it's emitted. It'll definitely decay and become fainter and fainter (Inverse Square Law), eventually blending with other faint signals also scattered and wandering through the space. We call it "noise", which is nothing but the sum of all cosmic EM activity that once happened since the dawn of time, especially (but not limited to) that of Big Bang, as "Cosmic Microwave Background", which is still around (it's just that our home equipment, as digital sets, are designed to ignore such noise, but people used to be able to tune into it with the early analog TV and radio receptors).
Now, there's a maxim from Hermeticism that says "As above, so below": just as we see the past from cosmos whenever we look at the skies, some hypotethical extraterrestrial civilization at hundreds of thousands of light-years from here would see (supposing they exist and supposing that they got highly advanced optics) a Pale Blue Dot with some minuscule flame spots on its surface, the bonfires once lit by Homo erectus when they began tinkering with fire. Those extraterrestrials won't see the Earth as it currently is relative to the Sun, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Milky Way, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Laniakea.
Those extraterrestrials definitely won't see our desperate signals begging for them to beam us up (from the former Arecibo transmission all the way to someone lonely blinking their home lights right now desperately trying to call the extraterrestrial attention): we're all screaming to the void, and the void screams back as a silent noise from long-gone celestial bodies. The cosmos is a big cemetery where ghosts are hauntingly compelled to roam around without getting anywhere (still they sometimes stumble upon other ghosts, when energy is absorbed by all sorts of cosmic matter both here and out there).
In the end, this is what happens with your home light every time you turn it off: it becomes some kind of "electromagnetic ghost" electrically "summoned" in your room and unleashed to the outer space, not to haunt, but to be haunted and devoured by the ineffable darkness of the abyss, where it will spend the eternity going everywhere to reach nowhere...Best comment I've read in a while. Thank you.
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It gets absorbed and reemitted by the walls of the room. Its reemitted as infrared light, due to the temperature of the walls. Eventually it just all ends up as heat.
The answer to the question "where did the energy go?" is "heat" 99% of the time.
Well, some of it might manage to go out the window.
Most of that will probably hit another building, or a tree, or the ground, or something, and get absorbed (and permitted), but some of it might not hit anything solid and carry on into the atmosphere... where a good part of it will end up hitting a cloud, or a nitrogen atom, or a pigeon... but some might end up in space. And carry on for aeons, into the cosmos.
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Isnt it conserved? Why cant you see it anymore?
It goes into your fridge.
Everybody knows that.
Don't believe me? Just open the door, and there it is!
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@[email protected] [email protected]
In order to understand what happens with the light from our earthly shelters, one needs to look up. See those stars shining all across the night sky? Those celestial bodies aren't where we see them, and many of them are long gone. So we don't see the stars, we see their "ghosts", compelled to physically wander through the spacetime continuum.
Roughly speaking, EM radiation (and, by extension, visible light) travels indefinitely to the far reaches of cosmos once it's emitted. It'll definitely decay and become fainter and fainter (Inverse Square Law), eventually blending with other faint signals also scattered and wandering through the space. We call it "noise", which is nothing but the sum of all cosmic EM activity that once happened since the dawn of time, especially (but not limited to) that of Big Bang, as "Cosmic Microwave Background", which is still around (it's just that our home equipment, as digital sets, are designed to ignore such noise, but people used to be able to tune into it with the early analog TV and radio receptors).
Now, there's a maxim from Hermeticism that says "As above, so below": just as we see the past from cosmos whenever we look at the skies, some hypotethical extraterrestrial civilization at hundreds of thousands of light-years from here would see (supposing they exist and supposing that they got highly advanced optics) a Pale Blue Dot with some minuscule flame spots on its surface, the bonfires once lit by Homo erectus when they began tinkering with fire. Those extraterrestrials won't see the Earth as it currently is relative to the Sun, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Milky Way, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Laniakea.
Those extraterrestrials definitely won't see our desperate signals begging for them to beam us up (from the former Arecibo transmission all the way to someone lonely blinking their home lights right now desperately trying to call the extraterrestrial attention): we're all screaming to the void, and the void screams back as a silent noise from long-gone celestial bodies. The cosmos is a big cemetery where ghosts are hauntingly compelled to roam around without getting anywhere (still they sometimes stumble upon other ghosts, when energy is absorbed by all sorts of cosmic matter both here and out there).
In the end, this is what happens with your home light every time you turn it off: it becomes some kind of "electromagnetic ghost" electrically "summoned" in your room and unleashed to the outer space, not to haunt, but to be haunted and devoured by the ineffable darkness of the abyss, where it will spend the eternity going everywhere to reach nowhere...I feel like this comment exaggerates how far the human eye can perceive into the universe. Anything you can see with your eyeball is only as far as a few hundred light years, which means it would be extremely unlikely that any star you can see is significantly different in location "now" than when the light emitted.
Also it would be extremely unlikely for any star you can see with your eyes to have died between the time light is emitted and when you experience it.
That's a different story for things you can see through a telescope, or through a camera, but just looking up... Those points of light are pretty close and extremely bright stars.
You do point out the light from the stars dim due to inverse square law, but don't forget they also red-shift due to the expansion of the universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation didn't start as microwaves, it started as red visible light that slowly red shifted into the infrared, then into microwave.
