So let’s talk about light. We’ve all seen sources of light such as lightbulbs, candles and even the light coming through the screen you are looking at right now. In this unit we learnt a lot about how light travels but we also learnt about bioluminescence, which was absolutely fascinating to me.

We watched a documentary about light called Life on earth by David Attough and it talked about how animals produced said bioluminescence and what they did with it i.e. mating, attacking, defense.

What you can see in the picture is Bioluminescent plankton.

Plankton is a Small organism that floats around in the ocean, recent studies show that when they get stressed they tend to glow and cause the waves to glow. Another Animal we learnt about was a firefly. You know those things that glow? “A firefly is a cute fuzzy thing with a bottom that glows and that small bratty children like to capture in jars.” – S. Klausen 2018 

But Again, what causes them to glow?

Fireflies have an enzyme in some organs in their lower abdomen that when triggered it causes their “bootys” to glow. The enzyme is called Luciferase. It lights up when it’s in the presence of magnesium or something called ATP or Adenosine triphosphate. ATP is a naturally occurring chemical found in all forms of life

It was a very interest topic and I would highly encourage you to look up more about it. Here’s a link to David Attenborough’s documentary: light on earth.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5sewgp

Next we talked about light in the broader sense of the work but mostly about how it travelled and how it reacted when you use a ray box, this metal box that shines light ,and shine it at a mirror shiny things that people use for narcissistically admiring themselves. It got a whole lot more interesting when we shone it at different shapes of mirrors like a convex ) mirror or a concave ( mirror.

After moving on from mirrors, we went to shining light from a Ray Box through different liquids and through lenses.

It was interesting to observe how the density of the liquid we shine the light through affected the refracted rays.

 

 

Moving in from that, we started working with lenses and how light traveled through a bi-concave lenses )( and through bi-convex lenses (). For the record, when you shine a light through a bi-convex lense it diverges and when you shine a light through a bi-concave lense it diverges.

Islam and Ibn al-Haytham 

After Exploring how we thought light interacted with different surfaces we watched a documentary about Islamic contributions to light. We mostly learnt about a very notable fellow named Ibn al-Haytham. Ibn al-Haytham was an Arab mathematician who was very prevalent during the Golden Age of Islam. He invented something you probably have heard of. The camera obscura, if you’ve ever seen it’s really neat. Let’s say that you were in a room with large windows and you completely black them out using dark material, you would then make one small hole and whatever was on the other side of the window would  be reflected through the pin hole and projected onto the back wall of said room. Ibn al-Haytham additionally also wrote a whole book about optics, where he reflected (pun intended) on what he observed with rays of light.

Lights influence in cultures and art work 

Light has been something that had been puzzling people for a long time. Isaac Newton was famous for his experiments with prisms. There was even artwork create about it which dates back to the 1800’s

So what have been the social influences of light? Well if you think about it light had been something that dates back to the beginning of the universe, the sun has been there ever since we humans have been around, same for the Stars. Both of these things have been around forever and have featured in many art pieces. Also something that can obsevered in a lot of religious artwork is Jesus or God being surrounded in light, so I think that means that lights was often associated with purity and godliness, so to speak.

My thoughts on light 

💡 Light definitely still confuses me, though this unit has definitely shed alot of light on this. I thought it was pretty interesting to learn about how light worked but was definitely fascinated me was bioluminescence, it seems so surreal, like imagine being able to produce your own light ! It was very interesting.

 

And to conclude that unit we took a test! Yay!