On rainbows--Part 6.

On the disarmingly simple and devilishly complicated inverse spectrum of light

It has finally become obvious to me why you do not understand why in a so-called subjective prismatic observation the spectrum appears inversely displayed. It has also become clear very recently in my mind why the conventional physicists have not a clue about the real causes of prismatic experiments, regardless of their so-called subjective or objective nature. Today I'm going to redress that tragic reality and you'll see the truth. Period.

You have had ample opportunity to be aware of how many conventional physicists of the highest pedigree in this world have tried to explain that long known observation that prismatical colours appear to the eye of the observer in inverse order to that cast on a screen. Effectively, VBGYOR instead of ROYGBV, in a direction running from the top towards the bottom of the prism. Today you'll be shown definitive proof that the conventional physicists just plainly cannot do it, regardless of what kind of spin they either have put or will ever put on whatever things they can feel free to choose from. 

That's all. Let's go.

A slit is casting a beam of white light onto a converging lens.

The beam is then entering a triangular prism, in which each individual wavelength bends at its own angle. Upon exiting the prism each wavelength bends, again at its own individual angle, a second time around. That results in the observed separation of the spectral colours. The order of the colours in a direction from the apex of the prism to the base is ROYGBV.

That particular order is due to the 'fact' that the speed of R in the prism is slowed down the least, of  V the most, and of all the other colours, in between those two in the known order.

That's basically the entire gamut of the conventional view on prismatic phenomena, and--based on known accounts--all mainstream physicists staunchly believe and declare that any other possible prismatic observation can be explained within the boundaries of that context. 

Now from all historical accounts that we have gathered since the very times of Sir Isaac Newton to this very other point in time there have been hardly any known challenges or demands calling on the mainstream physicist to please explain why "prismatical colours appear to the eye of the observer in inverse order to that cast on a screen". Personally I'm only aware of two. The first one that I know of was raised by Anthony Lucas in a couple of letters to Newton himself, three and a half centuries back. The second one was raised by a Canadian Engineer called Doug Marsh, only a few years ago. Although I had contacted Mr. Marsh in the past (to which in turn he courteously replied) that remained the entire extent of our communication. (Until five minutes ago, that is, when I sent the man a new email.) You can find his essay here and I suggest you read it.

Since I believe that you have read all the posts of this site you'd be well-aware of my own debates with some of the mainstream physicists out there, but the bare truth is that in all those cases I thought that in the end it was always manifestly obvious where the reality lay. In hindsight that may well have been an error in judgement, on my part. 

Overwhelmingly, two conventional replies to my challenges proved to be the most popular, the most used. Here and now I'll deal with them, and with any other if or whenever they might raise their heads in my living future.

Invariably, at some point pretty much everyone with conventional leanings took turns to remind me that things appear inverted on the human retina, and that he--the human--only managed to redress that wrong orientation in his brain via a long evolutionary process. Dr. Dutch did it, and--surprise, surprise--Dr. Selmke did it too. To both of them I replied that one of the first things a common thinker analyses when he encounters the inversely displayed spectrum is exactly that, but that he then dismisses it after thinking about it for no more than a couple of minutes. To that I then added that I will reveal that decisive 2 min line of reasoning if they either asked or dared me. Neither of them did either. So neither did I.

Today however I'll reveal it freely, for you.

If we have only learned to put things right in our brains in the conventional manner then we must have also somehow  learned to do it in all possible situations bar one: namely, when we look with the naked eye through a triangular prism at a source of light!!!

So, how long will you need to think about that, before you'll genuinely be able to make a sound sense of it and therefore  understand it truly? Time yourself, and remember that I have already given you the answer. Good luck.

That's all about this, let's go to the next one.

The second is the one that was discussed in that Physics Forums thread back in the year of 2010.

It is the one that has been visually depicted by mainstream physicists like in the two pictures shown below.

Conversely, it is the same one that I consequently dismissed because of the reality of the observational fact shown by the two pictures below and described in a direct message I sent that Claude Bile, Senior Adviser with a Ph.D. in optical physics, and published openly for everybody else in one of my subsequent posts following that thread. Which basically both conveyed the following matter-of-fact message: The conventional 'explanation' is fatally flawed due to the fact that in order for the observer's eye to see the inverse VBGYOR spectrum it must be placed well outside the path that is willy-nilly imposed by the mainstream understanding. And in fact I did even more than that, for then I showed with real pictures what the observer's eye will strictly be able to see when it's placed right in the beam of colours that emerges and extends all the way down from the prism.

 Which are factually of this kind of kinds.

Now, to my mind  what I had offered was conclusive proof that the conventional view was irrevocably flawed, dead, non-existent, bogus, hot air. But as I said a little earlier above that was until the other day--when I realised that in spite of all my explanations it was rather conspicuous that neither laity nor academia have nowhere near understood what kind of conditions must be met by any would-be explanation. So let me then add to everything that I have said before on this topic the following.

Look carefully at the picture above. Note the Newtonian ROYGBV spectrum that is literally cast onto an intercepting screen after exiting the prism. Think soundly and you should realise that any valid explanation must unquestionably show the same spectrum visibly cast and displayed on some screen of sorts, as well as contain a copy readily observable of the so-called subjective, VBGYOR spectrum within the same experimental setup. This is an absolute and non-negotiable prerequisite for any would-be explanation, and anything less than that should clearly and categorically be deemed unacceptable and therefore rejected out of hand. In view of this condition let me show you then that my particular prismatic setup does meet that requirement, fully. See below.

Not only that, if you look carefully towards the ceiling of the prism you'll readily notice two other inverse spectra, which have been generated by two of the three easily discernable slits.

Here you have a full view of the three inversely displayed spectra. Then below I'll show you in a sequential array of pictures what the observer's eye would see if it is placed not only in the beam of colours that emerge from the prism, but indeed anywhere near and around it as well.

It is time to now present for your scrutiny my own explanation for the observation, even though I have done it before.

The reversed VBGYOR order appears to the naked eye because the picture that it (the eye) gets is basically that of the prism itself and the image of that inversely running spectrum is effectively a travelling companion (or side-effect, if you prefer) embedded with the prism as such.

Let's have a look at a few more pictures now.

Observe and think. Look carefully at the spatial orientation of the objects relative to the orientation of camera's eye, as well as that of the prism itself. Think.

Observe and think. You remember how I explained the apparition of the inverse spectrum. Now look at what the arrow on the left is pointing. Think about that. As I have said, forget about the conventional spill about how diffraction is responsible for such observations. Think. Now put two and two together and you should see.

Take the beam of light marked by the left arrow and put it on the top of the beam (I shouldn't say 'beam', but I can't seem to get anything else at the moment.) that's laying on the floor. It is all visible, from the slit to the refracted beam that is passing on your right. Think.

This is a real picture, not tampered with in any way. It shows an entire process at work: that of refraction. Period.

On rainbows. Part 5--To the ponderer

On the colour dispersion of white light in my own universe

Let me begin this topic by reminding you first how the reigning conventional understanding depicts, visually, how a ray of white light  is dispersed into the known colour display called the spectrum by a typical triangular prism.

These two visual depictions are described as being "conceptual", which I suppose is intended to suggest that they are only qualitatively representative of the phenomenon as such. The first of the two is conceptually depicting the conventional wave aspect of light, while the second is clearly concerned with the particle aspect of it. Both pictures are quite conspicuously displaying all the major conventional attributes of the light and dispersion phenomena. For instance from the particle version of the duo it is immediately apparent that, according to the conventional understanding, when travelling through a prism the speed of the red light is greater than those of all other spectral lights.

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A quick note to the ponderer. 

If you want to get an accurate picture of where exactly our contemporaneous understanding in physics truly is my genuine advice is to forget consulting any online website that is associated with any official institution or similar representative (e.g. Wikipedia) and to direct your attention instead to fora like Physics Forums and Physics Stack Exchange. It is only in places like the two I mentioned where you'll be able to get a clear picture of the reality of our time in the subject of physics. As a concrete example that is directly related to our current topic click on this link and on this one.

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Now, let me make no bones about it, when it comes to the subject of how the conventional dogma describes what a ray of white light is and how it is dispersed by a prism into a spectrum I can (barely) manage to keep some sort of a straight face these days and pretend (to the best of my meagre abilities) to listen politely to those who are preaching the conventional view. To give you another concrete example that is directly related to this issue please have a good look at the 'pearls of wisdom' I extracted from this thread that took place in 2010 in the Physics Forums. 

This was the question that started the thread and what you'll see below (if you haven't visited the link I gave above a moment ago) are some of the most prominent answers it attracted in reply.

Now, for those who don't know it I have to say that I have dealt with this particular thread in the past. But the truth is that when I did it (eight years back into the past, I think) I left a handful of things untouched, so today I am mending that misdeed of mine. Without any additional explanations, however. Not even in regards to why I have changed the "up" for the "left". See below.

There is no secret by now that according to my understanding the distribution of colours in the typical spectrum is well defined and ordered. This is naturally in total contrast to the view of the conventional understanding, which--apparently--looks something like this.

The four pictures above come from a You Tube video made by a high school teacher, I believe, in order to explain to her students, I guess, how refraction occurs in a triangular prism. Pretty wild, huh?

Nothing like that in my own understanding.

The picture above is meant to be looked at through a triangular prism (equilateral one, preferably) from a distance of about 1.5 m. (Prism should be oriented with its apex/vertex pointing to the left of the observer.) When such observation is conducted the three coloured bars vertically displayed on the right hand of the picture will merge, forming a ray of light (approximately) similar to the one shown horizontally. (Approximately because the coloured bars are dispersed by the prism into individual spectra themselves. Additionally, when blue refracts in a subjective prismatic observation on a black background it leaves behind a band of  a dark green hue, which you can clearly see laying along the right side of the original trio.)

Now, those three bars (which are obviously coloured in the primary hues) are joining together along the same line because in all subjective prismatic observations Red is deflected towards the base of the prism, Blue towards the apex, while Green does not change its position at all. 

And you can see the same law at work again if you next direct your attention to the horizontally placed ray of light (while continuing to look through your prism, of course). You know what I mean?

My ray of light is sufficient to account for light propagation, refraction, dispersion and diffraction as well, and all without any additional conditions. Now that is something that your conventional ray just cannot do, full stop. Do you dispute this fact, Markus Selmke? Or are you looking now at whether you should remind me or not that what I've done so far is to merely make declarations? Really, do I need to show you how easily  beautifully easy all those things can be accomplished when my ray of light is employed? 

Well, if I have to, I will. But not now. Next time, for now I want to show you instead another definitive proof that your so-called "well understood, quantified" theory of dispersion is flatly false. Have a look below.

Figured it out yet? No? OK, I'll show you some more pictures. And this time some of your own.

How about now? Still nothing? OK, but I'm afraid you'll have to wait until my next post, for now I have to go and see my little granddaughter--who, unlike you, is a real handful. Hooroo!

On rainbows. Part 4.

There is one particularly interesting little story that occurred in my former correspondence with Dr. Markus Selmke I don't think I ever mentioned on these pages before, so I'll do it today because it's certainly worth knowing (by the discerning mind). 

After a few intense weeks of being involved in a torrid exchange of emails with Dr. Selmke I was beginning to get a pretty confident picture of what the man in question might be really like and about, so one day I decided to put it to a certain test, for good measure. Specifically, in a short and seemingly unrelated email to any other since then I asked the good Dr. to put a percentage number on how confident he truly was that the conventional understanding of rainbows was correct. A short time later his answer was crying out from my inbox and under the cheeky gaze of my Greek I opened the email and wryly grinned aloud the (rather sadly, and quite disappointingly) unsurprising figure. The test was over and in an instant I was completely freed of any lurking sense of either guilt, regret, remorse or wonder.

I have been taking my time with this post. There's no need to hurry. I remember reading somewhere, a long time ago now, someone's answer to a question whether one who might harbour a belief in possessing some great scientific insight should be wary about how to expose it to the world at large, in order to prevent/avoid/insure that it won't be stolen or claimed by some one else, later. One, the answer went, should not worry at all about that, for if one's unspecified scientific insight should happen to really be "great" then one shall find that no one will even think about doing anything of the kind. 

Clever. More importantly, though, true 😎!😂 

Almost a year ago to the day I received the email below from Markus Selmke. Today I decided to answer it.

Dear Remus,

Your answer does not address the points I have raised. I take it that you have no meaningful response to offer.

Why don't you do all those things yourself

I did indeed, indirectly many times. The direct measurement is too simple to warrant a dedicated section in a lab course, but you will find it in the curricula of many schools with dedicated experimental setups. In my physics training I have for instance done many of the following experiments myself:

http://home.uni-leipzig.de/physfp/fprakt.html

You will find spectroscopy among them, which for dispersive spectrometers is based precisely on snells law of refraction and dispersion.

You may also remember that I have published research. I have used Snells law in combination with dispersion many times and found good agreement with experiments I have done myself. My latest contribution in this direction being the fairly simple deomstration experiment and its quantification here: https://128.84.21.199/abs/1608.08664 (to appear in the next issue of Am. J. Phys., after a vetting and partial rewriting within the due course of a proper and lengthy critical review process; in fact you will be able to notice the difference between the final version and the submitted manuscript according to the ArXiv version). I found the agreement with experiments only WITH the inclusion of dispersion, and inferior results without. Unsurprisingly, I should say, because dispersion is, contrary to your baseless and evidently uninformed claim, a century-old well-supported, understood, measured and quantified fact. It may even be derived and understood from more fundamental laws like the Maxwell equations together with an appropriate atomistic model for matter.

BTW: You again demonstrate that you lack a fundamental understanding of the concept of light altogether. There is simply no way to individually send a single wavelength through a prism in an experiment. You will always be concerned with spectral distributions, even for narrow bandwidth laser sources! But this is, admittedly, the smallest of errors you make, with the more grave one being that you lack an understanding of the scientific method.

Also, I am curious: Did you test yourself whether gravity works as Newton described it? Did you ever jump off a cliff to find your velicity to increase linearly with time? I’m afraid not, but other people tested it (well, not by jumping) and found precise agreement. They even made quantitativly testable predictions of experimental outcomes. Your car will use the mechanical principles so eloquently framed by Newton, yet you didn’t test them all, did you? And so does your camera use the different refrangibility of colors. Or binoculars for that matter which truly use prisms directly. They are color-corrected in fact to counteract the measurable color dispersion effect. It should be unneccessary to state it again, but of course there is abundant evidence in the scientific literature to support this (including my miniscule contributions) contrary to your laughable claim (again, abstracting from the fact that you can only send spectral distributions of colors through a prism).

You may now apologize if you understand the above and the previous email in full.

Frustratedly,

Markus

Dear Markus,

Last year when I received your email, cited in full above, I had a good look at your  usual array of childish assumptions and their commensurately stupid and even more infantile extensions, I smiled and then decided to leave you continuing to bask in your pompous ignorance for the time being. Today, however, when I happened to stumble across it once again I suddenly realised that it in fact would be the best starting cue for this particular post. So here I am, ready to address more points than you can even imagine--let alone raise.

Leaving aside your incoherent ranting about dispersion, Snell's law, spectroscopy, etc. let me first tell you why I asked you conduct a proper experiment in order to confirm once and for all that Snell's law is indubitably valid. 

If you google the most relevant terms concerned with the subject of colour dispersion you will find that basically all sites that cover the issue use one and the same setup in every case. Specifically, starting with a version of Newton's experimentum crucis they separate colours from a dispersed beam of white light and thereof proceed to pass them through prisms placed at minimum deviation and finally compare the results according with Snell's refractive equations. Now, to my mind that particular method was fraught with danger, especially when used exclusively, as it seemed to be to the best of my research. (Why fraught with danger I'll tell you in a moment.)

And there was an additional reason for my request. I knew you simply had not only the knowledge and expertise to address the issue properly: You also had far superior means than my Kmart laser pointers and prisms.

Now, regarding my suspicious outlook towards Snell you'd be wise to treat it carefully, for I not only have a much firmer grasp of the subject than you'd be willing to consider, but that I have also found such a beautiful and healthy reason for dispersion that will make your heart skip a few beats when you will hear it.

Being aware that Snell developed his law a long time before Newton himself came unto the scene made me wonder how the man could have possibly managed to conceive of such an apparently accurate tool of assessment without having a real understanding of how white light was dispersed by a prism in a full spectrum of colours. Had Snell developed his law after Newton I certainly wouldn't have had a problem with the idea. But before?! (These days Snell's law is stated to be derivable from Fermat's principle of least time, but we should not forget that Snell's law was created some 30 years before Fermat laid down that principle.) Nonetheless, in time I came to realise that one could rather easily begin with compiling empirical results from prismatic observations, combine then those with certain mathematical and geometrical principles, derive symmetries by relating observational results and variables, unite all of those via some binding coefficients and finally use the recipe to practically enforce, define and in the end 'standardise' the whole industry, so to speak. In fact that has been the mainstream practice since those very times. And that is a most perilous methodology. So perilous that by now it has contaminated your mob so chronically that you seem to have all become decidedly impotent to see, or even imagine, how blatantly wrong your celebrated optical doctrines are. 

...dispersion is, contrary to your baseless and evidently uninformed claim, a century-old well-supported, understood, measured and quantified fact. 

There is only one thing I can say about the above statement: that when all current facts are considered you have to be either a genuine prophet or a fair dinkum fool to make it. Time will undoubtedly reveal the truth of that matter. (And at this point I should also tell you now the percentage figure I got from Markus Selmke in regard to the little story I shared with you at the beginning of this post, even though I suspect that most of you guessed it already. The figure was, yes, exactly 100%.)

If Markus Selmke understands perfectly well what dispersion is he certainly knows more about it than at least one of the creators of QED ever did. I'm referring here to none other than Richard Feynman, who candidly admitted in these videotaped lectures that he did not understand what exactly happens in the interaction of light with different media. The only thing the great man admitted that he could say on the subject was what effects appeared to unfold under the eye of a careful observer. As my friend Michael Heffron pointed out to me not long ago, when it comes to the subject in question what a genuine physicist of these times can only say is what Sheldon Cooper said in one episode of The Big Bang theory: "I can explain it to you, but I can't make you understand".

Now that is one thing I have always known myself. Furthermore, that is exactly the reason why I have embarked all these years ago on my personal foray into the subject. As most laymen out there, I simply did not understand what our crop of physicists were talking about so I set out (on my own) to change all that. Yes, I know, it was rather typically arrogant from someone in my position to even imagine that I could do that, but that is the truth and that's what I did. Moreover, that's not all either, for these days I have become even more arrogant, if you will, for these days I am here claiming that I do understand what happens when light interacts with different media, creating the chromatic dispersion that is observed in prismatic experimentation and the atmospheric optics phenomena in the process. Moreover still, in contrast to what Sheldon Cooper said (and to what a genuine physicist should say on the subject of light-matter interaction) I am asserting here that I can not only explain the subject to you, but that I can also make you understand. Make of this what you will, just don't make it in haste. Stay with me.

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Since I have always been a layman who dared to preach in the conventional temple you can imagine that my 'sermons' are vastly different to those that have pharisaically been preached to the world for a number of centuries now. For instance mine contain very little mathematics, while theirs are by and largely chanted in that language. Furthermore, my own presentations are routinely embedded in familiar pictures, while theirs are most of the time encrypted in complicated graphics, charts and other similar concoctions of arcane data. But perhaps the greatest difference between our two forms of expression is the fact that my own language is very simple while theirs is convoluted and alien to the majority of those listening. Then I must also mention that their expositions can often put a dizzying spell on their audience, while mine are most of the time noticeably un-impressing even the best of those genuinely trying to feign some  degree of interest. What can I say, the truth is that we have always come to the same temple, but always from the exactly opposite ends of the town: when I come from the South they come from the North, and when I happen to arrive from the East they invariably choose to do so from the West👍👎👉👈.

But let me give you next a number of other discrepancies between us that are more relevant to our current bone of contention.

As a concrete example, take Newton's famous experimentum crucis and compare it to mine. (Yes, I do have one of those myself--see below.)

In spoken language: I laid down on a flat surface a short message written on a piece of paper, I then positioned my eye on a line of sight running perpendicularly along the same plane and finally I slid a prism in between them. Hello.

That was my experimentum crucis,  in a nutshell. It was crucis because it was due to it that in a swift period of time I managed to learn the most important things about what happens (about what really happens) in all prismatic interactions between light and matter. See the pictures I will drop below and think a little, if you really want to see where I'm coming from and where I'm heading to. Alternatively, make an effort and read all my previous posts. Otherwise consider leaving this site (right now, please) for I'm surely not interested in your company either😎.

Let me now show you the main reason that had led and driven me to the entire process. See the picture below and remember one particular prismatic observation, which Newton had been well aware of but left  alone (without any explanation).

The observational fact in question is that when a beam of white light is looked at directly with the naked eye, which is a so-called subjective observation, the order of colours in the spectrum is reversed--VBGYOR instead of ROYGBV. As we know, Newton was well aware of that fact but he never left anything more  to us on that subject beside casually mentioning it in his Opticks. Now to my mind that showed that he did not have any plausible explanation for it and that he sure as hell wasn't going to admit it. And indeed that was to eventually become poignantly evident when he categorically refused to discuss that subject when Lucas mentioned it in one of his letters.