I assume you are referring to inclandestine bulbs and not fluorescent; because they are boring.
Fluorescent bulbs use an electrical current to excite mercury atoms, which then emit UV photons, which interact with the phosphorous coating on the bulb giving off white light. If you were asking about those, you can now stop reading.
Inclandestine bulbs also use electricity, but use it differently. The boring bulbs used the energy to make photons directly, thereby being more efficient. The other bulbs, the ones being discussed here, use the energy like our bodies use caffeine, especially the bodies of young kids. What happens is that the caffeine makes them hyper, they start running around yelling, knocking into things, breaking things, and by the end of the evening they are hot and sweaty sitting in a corner with a lampshade on their head.
It is remarkable how similar the light bulbs are. You run a current through the bulb, specifically the tungsten filament. This infusion of electrons gets the tungsten hyper. The atoms start to get all riled up knocking into their neighbors. This bumping causes the atoms to loose photons, which are then used to light the room. Tungsten has white photons, which allow us to see everything in the world. The white photons tend to become colorful when they run into things. Different things make them differently colorful.
Clandestine bulbs work in the same manner, but instead of tungsten, a proprietary material is used which has black photons. This is typically called a black light.
Friday, April 20, 2007
How do Light bulbs work?
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2 comments:
Why are some photons attracted to different materials? Like, why does tungsten have white ones, and proprietaries have black ones? Also, are black photons into hip hop?
As far as what music they like, I can not answer, but the propensity of some materials to prefer one type of photon over the other has to do with when they were made.
Humans have what are referred to as birth stones. January is the Garnet, April is the diamond, October is the opal.
The fact is atoms have the same traditions; but they use photons instead. Not only are they cheaper, but they are more on scale with atoms.
This phenomenon can be seen physically, and have been called absorption lines, historically. If you were to pass white light (a collection of all colors of photons, not white photons) through a gas of a pure material it will absorb certain colors exclusively. If you then excite the material it will loose those same photons, and it can only loose those colors, because that is all it collected.
So, how does an atom pick a birth color photon? It deals with how it is made. All matter was formed in stars, and all stars have cycles. Our star, the sun, has an 11 year cycle. Different materials are made at different points in the cycle.
There is still much work which need to be done in this field of study. But there are the basics.
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