Collaboration Day 9

I
know that at the end of our last meeting I said that we'll begin this Day 9 of collaboration with that very hazy conventional topic of diffraction, but due to yet another email from Markus Selmke we'll have to change a little (only a little) our promised schedule.

Hey there!

From time to time, as you know by your beloved Google analytics, I check out your newest blog fun-bits… I was surprised to see that you claimed I would have had nothing to say about your flask experiment. In fact, the opposite is true and in a previous e-mail I have tried to explain to you that there is nothing wrong with your experiment, niether the acrylic ball one, nor the water sphere experiment. They both show a rainbow pattern to emerge. All according to Descartes’ theory (this being the important point you miss). I do not discredit any of your experiments. They show what they show, i.e. an artificial rainbow exactly as one would expect it. The angles will be different according to the equation (see also: http://www.philiplaven.com/p8e.html)

I am not sure if those symbols tell you anything (numbers? cosine?), but if they do, you can easily find the angular coordinates of the first and second order rainbows by using n=1.33 for water and n=1.55 for your quartz (depending on the exact material / kind of quartz you have there).

You also draw a correct picture (I was positively surprised), see below. It is just that I (and likely any other person on this planet) am amazed how you can not connect this with Descartes theory of the rainbow?

Other people have been more successful in drawing a pretty picture (ignore “total internal reflection" in the picture, that is incorrect), but in principle you got it right:

Blue light gets refracted the most, as you have kind of drawn correctly. Now, when you combine this with the rays behavior close to the limiting angle (interactive raytracing: https://www.geogebra.org/m/xAMsmnJb), i.e. the angle of least deviation, you will find that the last shimmer of light which reaches your eyes comes from red light and from a higher position in the sky. And that in the region of the sky below there will be all colors (i.e. added to white). This is why the rainbow appears RED on the outside. And has mixed color (i.e. no pure spectrum! compare the colors to your prism experiment) close to its rim.

This is the email I got from Markus Selmke on the 3rd of March. For eight days after we thought how it should be best to treat it. Then, on the 11th of March we decided that before doing anything about it we ought to find out what kind of dough is Markus Selmke ultimately made out of. So I send him this short message:

Markus Selmke, how convinced are you that you are correct in what you're saying? Percentage-wise.

Then, for the next four or five hours I worked on the material I will use in this post, with the smart Greek poking to my brain incessantly with the questions: “So, what do you reckon? Will he? Won’t he? Dare to put a wager on it?”. Although he certainly annoyed me as he only knew how, in the end I couldn’t stop myself smiling every time he was coming up with a new one. Tell you the truth, I had a feeling that he (Markus) was going to do it.

Later that day I open my mail box and I find this answer from MS, sitting in waiting for a few hours already:

How convinced I am that Descarte’s rainbow theory is correct in the sense that it explains the main features and the physical principle of the rainbow’s formation (i.e. excluding polarization & diffraction details)?: 100%.

How convinced I am that Descarte’s ray theory of the rainbow taken together with dispersion explains each and every detail of your experiment (i.e. the features you talk about): 100%. I have provided ray tracings which show what you see in your experimental context.

Out of curiosity: How certain are you in the meanwhile about your assessment that the world is wrong on optics (or opticks as you call it) and you are the bringer of truth?

Yeah, as I had expected.

Okay, now we can start talking about diffraction, and as we’ll go along I will answer the main points raised by Markus Selmke in his last two emails as well.

If you ask a conventional physicist to tell you the reason for the rays of light in the two pictures above displaying what it looks like spectral colours she will immediately answer, without taking any moment for reflection, that the colours you see are due to the diffraction the light rays undergo when they enter either an observer’s eye or a camera’s diaphragm. It matters not one iota to her that you can easily show her that there are serious and obvious questions regarding her answer which neither her conventional theory nor her observable data can answer to any satisfactory degree, because in as far as she and her world are concerned, diffraction it is and the case is therefore closed. But the truth in the matter is nothing like hers, and it is certainly not closed, as we shall have ample opportunity to see today.

Firstly, thus, let us watch a video I have uploaded on You Tube specifically for this day.

Of course, by now you are already aware of the probably most radical difference between our understanding and the conventional, Newtonian one--the longitudinal distribution of the spectral colours in a ray of light. It is therefore very likely that you have already noticed the things that I'm about to refer you to in this video, and in fact it may very well be that even at this early moment in our current subject you could imagine, without any help, from what kind of grounds and perspectives I will conduct my attack on the conventional understanding of diffraction. Nonetheless, I myself will try to forget that as much as I can, for otherwise I will be tempted to rush a bit too swiftly between the many and important things that are connected in my head to the subject of conventional diffraction.

Before getting to any other matters that are diffraction related there are three things of significance that the video above brings to the attention of the committed mind. (See them below, for the time being.)

The first picture (above on the left) shows a rather unexpected feature of my crystal quartz sphere. That is the fact that in total disregard to the conventional requirements my crystal ball directs a beam of light passing through it on the rainbow path, so to speak, which is of course that of 42°. Now, to be honest, the reason I said that this was a rather unexpected feature of a crystal ball was entirely due to Selmke's unrelenting insistence that everything my crystal ball was showing had no relevance whatsoever because its index of refraction was totally different to water's index of refraction, of 1.33. Of course, to the minds of Selmke and Co. the rainbow angle is strictly a consequence of the named index of refraction of light in water, and that is not in the least surprising when one takes into consideration the prevalent historical record of the conventional establishment (if you know what I mean). After all, the only thing they have proven again and again over the years is that they are very accomplished taxonomists (and that they can calculate, a little).

But to our mind the rainbow angle had to be connected to and arrived at from underlying theoretical principles. That's because it is only thus that truly overarching physical entities can become not merely usable but also beautiful to a real physicist's mind, body and spirit. (And that is also because to be able to calculate anybody can learn, whereas to become a real physicist you need to be gifted by God.) We shall return to this subject a little later, after we'll discuss the other two pictures in the collage above.

Now, what can we say about the other two pictures above? Well, before anything else we should say first that even if you were to ask a conventional physicist again for the reason that there are seemingly spectral colours distributed longitudinally in the displayed rays of light, one could quite confidently still believe that she will unperturbedly reply in the same manner: "Diffraction". (For otherwise what else could she say?) But then, of course, the reality is that there can be no longitudinal diffraction within that particular setup, so... Whatever.

I want to invite you now to take a stroll with me this evening on this pathway that is running along the main road in our town. Our purpose for taking this stroll is to look at the headlights of the incoming traffic in order to see more clearly the difference between ourselves and the conventional minds in regards to that that they call diffraction.

There is no doubt that when you look (directly, with the naked eye) at the headlights of the passing cars you can easily see that the majority of the rays of light coming from the car are spectrally coloured (very much like in the three pictures above). In fact all the lights that come to your eyes at angles other than those that are coming along on paths that are perpendicularly horizontal relative to your eyes, are spectrally coloured, as I was saying. (See picture below.)

Now, to the conventional mind that chromatic display of light is, of course, due to the diffraction effects we have mentioned before. To our own mind, on the other hand, that chromatic display is simply a manifestation of the fact that in the so-called white light the spectral colours are longitudinally distributed (and in order with their increasing wavelengths).

Now, it is well worth mentioning again a couple of things that are connected with the issue we're discussing at the moment. Remember that in my own prismatic experimentum crucis it was due to the prism's geometrical morphology that the spectral colours that form the so-called white light came into the view of the observer. In our current subject it is due to a somewhat similar reason that the spectral colours make themselves visible to the observer, and that is because the spatial orientation of the light rays is not perpendicularly horizontal to the observer's eye (in which case, of course, no colours at all would be observable).

And now, since you're still strolling with us this evening, I should perhaps mention a fact which is even more important than those we have thus far covered here. To make it easier to see what I have in mind let us stop for a while under this streetlight. If you take a good look now at the light display generated by this streetlight you will easily notice that the same situation like the one with the cars' headlights is happening here too. However, in addition to that you should also notice quite clearly that when your eye begins to pay attention to the entire pattern that is formed by all the light rays emitted by the light globe above, it will look very much like a genuine picture of Newton's rings! Take your time, there's no hurry at all in our own private bubble, and I guarantee you that it will not be too long at all before you will see the picture I told you about in all its fullness and glory. That's all I'll say about that here and now, but you can rest assured that we'll come back to this topic soon enough.

In the email at the beginning of this post Markus Selmke wrote at some stage:

You also draw a correct picture (I was positively surprised), see below. It is just that I (and likely any other person on this planet) am amazed how you can not connect this with Descartes theory of the rainbow?

The picture he was referring to is the one I will drop below in a moment, but first I must reveal to you that like in most other issues he chose to write me about he assumed that I had drawn it. The truth is that the picture in question I simply downloaded it from the Google Images following some query I had made.

But that is hardly important, I guess, although I must say that all his groundless and therefore stupid assumptions annoy the hell out of me! What is really important is his (and apparently any other person's on this planet) amazement that I cannot connect this picture with Descartes' theory of the rainbow. It is in regard to that remark that I will now say the following:

To Dr. Markus Selmke & all the other people in the world who are apparently amazed that I cannot connect the conventional picture above to Descartes' theory of the rainbow

Let it be known to all of you that there are a number of good reasons because of which I refuse to buy Descartes' theory of the rainbow, but that there is one reason in particular which beside overriding all others, in the end unequivocally shows that you, as a whole, are completely incapable to listen carefully, reason soundly and decide wisely in even the most conspicuous circumstances in order to assure and insure that you are not just a frightened little soul who's desperately looking to find a voice and some comfort by following the march of the many.

Let it be known to all of you out there who are boasting conventional physicists planted firmly behind canon and dogma and who've been ruling and manipulating the rest of the world with the conniving attitude of a feudal mediocrity, that by your buying of Descartes' theory of the rainbow you have truly proved that you are nothing more than a feudal mediocrity indeed.

Finally, listen carefully to that overriding reason that has stopped me from buying the conventional theory of the rainbow and that will forever remind the world of tomorrow that not one of you has seemingly managed to see it for four hundred years now.

There is no way in the physical reality that either a ray or a beam of light could be dispersed in a sphere in the manner illustrated by the conventional understanding. Only a triangular prism can disperse a ray/beam of light in the illustrated manner, and a sphere is not a prism. A sphere is a lens. Period.

And with that you can now think about it. Or, alternatively, try to prove me wrong and therefore get busy experimenting. In the meantime, I will have a coffee and a couple of smokes.