What can we see with a prism?

I See Light ~ I See Color

Mothers, you asked me to provide science for your children. Maybe you did this because you like to hear the woodpecker pounding away in the still, summer air, or, you want to save the whales and want your children to want to do same, or maybe you like unanswered questions, lots of them. Or maybe it is because of the global warming issue. For whatever reason, I will accommodate your wishes and begin our adventure in this forest, in this redwood stand that is twice as old as my grandfather. But, before we begin, I want to read something to you that tells you who I am and how I view what I see, and how I expose a child to what I see. Listen carefully for the childlike metaphors, the hint of life in colored light and a child's choice of words when describing the energy of light. Judy Wilken MS

“Your nose is green on one side and purple on the other,” Chance yelled out. “Your hands are weird. Your thumbs are orange.” Chance and I were looking through a prism at one another for the first time and laughing. Some of the other children were watching the small animals playing on the ground in the bright summer light. “That squirrel is rainbowed,” they yelled out in excitement. “Hey, you’re way over there.”

Rose red light and lemon yellow light looked like they were pouring out of things; things like leaves, branches and shoe laces. Tangible things. Blueberry blue and grape purple layers of light as thick as your thumb curled around shadows. Intangible things. This tiny prism had suddenly rolled us out of our familiar world where leaves are green and noses are fleshed and we found ourselves eye deep in color, colored light.

Our familiar world was now very strange. Our everyday world had vanished. It had vanished with the blink of an eye. Trees were not barked. Instead, they were wrapped in red, orange and yellow light on one side of the trunks, and green, blue and purple light on the other side of the trunks. The yellow petals of the Black-eyed Susan of summer were rimmed with red light on one side and green light on the other side. Miner's lettuce along the meadow's edge was shining brilliantly with yellow light on one side of each leaf and blue light on the other side.

The children anxiously called out the names of the colors of light as if they were naming the colors in a new crayon box. "I see blue. I see red. I see green." I too began naming colors of light while imagining that I was looking, not at colors in a crayon box, but rather, at the vivid red of expanding universes and the mysterious blue of nuclear energy, of spectra of colored light streaming out of the atoms in the stars, the rocks under my feet, the matter in my hair, my skin-- every tiny piece of matter in my body.

'It's like Disneyland,"Jill shouted in a rush of excitement. "There’s color everywhere I look."

"It's like fairyland." Serene stood close to me, quietly looking through her prism at the summered meadow in amazement. "I want to take this, all of this, to heaven with me," She whirled around to Nissa with a boldness that was at odds with the soft folds of her ballerina skirt. "Fairyland," she squealed out.

"Light. It's light. It's everywhere." Joshua could not wait to show his mother. "It's on the bark. See. It's on the flowers, and on my hands even." He shoved one of his hands out in front of him, displaying it boldly as if showing her his muscles.

What we mothers were experiencing was the sound of untamed excitement of our children with nature's ways, especially her ways with waves of light energy passing through a 2 inch piece of plastic. No piece of plastic had ever seduced our children to carry on like this. Their yells and squeals reminded me of my yells and squeals when I first discovered colored light through a piece of plastic. Less than the price of cotton candy at a summer fair, each of these prisms held the key to open the gate to inquiry, to exploration-- to a generously colored palate that is ever present in every leaf, shoelace and puffy cloud in the sky overhead.

“What is really happening anyway inside this prism?" Joshua’s mother asked me while looking at a young redwood through a prism of her own. To read my explanation go to: StarChild Science: Teach Your Own

This ebook is designed to provide you with a new path to understanding energy. By experiencing the behavior of light energy a clear understanding of what light energy is all about will result for both you and your child. As one homechooling mom in Sealy, Texas recently wrote: "I love your book. I like it because you start with light. I think everything is linked to the energy of light. Einstein discovered that and from that discovery we have all the thousands of wonderful technologies at our fingertips. That's why I like your work. You have made it so simple for all of us non-science moms." Lisa, homeschooling mom of a 10 year old girl.

The prism, flashlight and diffraction glasses are only $9.95. Your child can experience both refraction and diffraction as well as have a perfect little flashlight all his/her own!

Click on any of these images to go to catalog.

I find that when a prism is made to go around a child's neck, it is far less prone to being lost or damaged. I drill a prism at the top and place an eye into it. Then I string a cord through the eye so a child can wear the prism around his neck. You never know when you might want to look at something through a prism.

“The best way I can answer your question about light traveling through a prism and producing a spectrum is to go back to a childhood experience that I had in the cob-weather of Saskatchewan, Canada. When I was around ten I would sit for hours at a time on the top of a hill and watch a vast field of wheat sway in the wind. I was captivated as ripples in the wheat grew then disappeared, grew once again then disappeared.

"I was mesmerized as I watched wave after wave travel through the wheat field without once carrying with it a single blade of wheat. Even as young as I was, I intuitively knew that each wave was not a thing, tangible thing like a piece of gum or a bicycle. It was not made of some material stuff. Each wave was energy that was moving, moving through the wheat field. And this movement had a pattern. It created areas of high activity with calm areas in between. And these highs and lows moved through the field continuously.

“When we relocated down to California, I found myself watching ocean waves for whole afternoons at a time under blue, sunny skies. Again, I noticed not a single piece of kelp, not one sea otter or boat would be carried along with a wave. They, like the blades of wheat, were left behind. I could see that

the waves were not the ocean just as they were not the wheat. They passed through the ocean just as they had passed through the wheat. I didn't know it at the time but I was watching each ocean wave borrow the water as it traveled through the water just as I had watched each wheat wave borrow the wheat as it traveled through the wheat. I was twelve years old before I found myself not thinking of things anymore but thinking of non- things, not of thinking of tangible objects to thinking of processes. I guess you can say I started feeding on 'process' then and it has captivated my attention ever since."

I reached into my lessons basket and drew out a diagram of a wave. “The energy we call light also travels in the form of a wave. Each wave of light has high parts called crests and low parts called troughs. Ups and downs. This is a pattern that all waves have.

"A wave is an interesting phenomenon in that it is larger than itself. It can separate itself from its source and carry information away. Remember the light from the flashlight? Waves of light carried information away from the flashlight and entered our jars, some of it went through the bottom of our jars and lit up our tee shirts.

"Notice in this diagram that a wave has an up and a down to it. A wavelength is made up of an up, a crest, and a down, a trough. As it moves along it manifests a frequency, the number of ups and downs that pass a certain point in a unit of time, say one second. Our eyes have cone shaped cells in the back of the retina that can respond to a range of frequencies from red light all the way to the higher frequencies of violet light. This is the visible spectrum. As you go from red light to violet light the wavelengths become shorter and shorter while frequency and energy increase. When the cone shaped cells are stimulated by these frequencies they send chemical messages to the brain and the brain interprets these messages as 'colored light'."

Joshua’s mother interrupted me with such abruptness it startled me. “So a white beam of visible light like from the flashlight is a mixture of seven visible colors. And each color has its own wavelength.“

“Yes." I reached into my lessons basket again and took out a model of a lightbeam I had invented for the children. I called over to Nissa and asked her to hold it up to her eye and bend it. "This lightbeam is just a

model. Models are used all of the time in science to help illustrate certain phenomena. "Nissa, bend the white ribbon slightly and let's see what happens to the colored ribbons inside of it." She obliged and bent the lightbeam ever so slightly. "Oh my. The colors separate out and now you can see all seven of them." Joshua's mother wanted a lightbeam of her own so we set about making one for her.

As we closed the edges of her lightbeam firmly with masking tape, Nissa began to draw a rainbow on the white ribbon of her own lightbeam. "I know what I'm going to do with my lightbeam. I'm going to hang it around my neck so everybody can see what happens to white light when I bend it," she told Joshua's mother.

“I see now. With that model I can see that visible light is made up of seven different colors or wavelengths. And when white light bends all the seven different wavelengths separate out into a spectrum." Joshua's mother leaned in closer to the lightbeam and added, "I can see the order too."

"After entering the prism all of these different colors, all of these different wave- fronts of light are bent, or as scientists say, 'refracted’, by different amounts. This bending causes the wave- fronts to change direction.” I reached into my lessons basket again and pulled out an illustration for her to follow. “Take a close look at this illustration of the bicycle wheels and the sidewalk.”

She turned to the illustration and immediately saw what she had seen many times with Joshua while watching him ride his tricycle in front of their house. "This is a familiar scene for me. Whenever one of the wheels of Joshua's tricycle would drift off the sidewalk and into the grass he always turned and slowed down. If he was going real fast his tricycle would tip over and he would end up crying."

"This picture gives the classical description of what happens to light as it travels through a prism. The path of light changes direction just like Joshua's path changed direction when one wheel went into the grass. When this happens to a wave-front of light it sets the stage for a change in speed."

"Oh, yes, that too. Joshua always lost speed when one wheel got caught in the grass."

"The same thing happens with light going through a prism. As it travels through the prism the straight beam of white light bends. The red end of the spectrum with its long wavelengths bends more than the violet end of the spectrum with short wavelengths.” I watched her raise the prism up in front of her eyes and stare at layers of red and orange light on top of Joshua’s blond hair.

"Each color of light, each wavelength of visible light, now travels at a different speed. This creates a 'speed gradient' inside the prism. Some wavelengths of visible light are now traveling slower than others. The 'speed gradient' allows the wavelengths to separate, creating a multicolored band or spectrum. This spectrum of colors is then scattered inside the prism. The same thing happens with drops of water to make a rainbow."

"I can see that there is energy, the energy of light, and information, The Information here is in the form of a spectrum isn't it?"

"Very good. Yes. That's the information. Now you are getting the hang of it."

"It is an interesting world, this world of light waves. I had no idea all these things were happening with light and the prism. I can't believe it." The degree of her own ignorance had suddenly magnified in front of her. "But I do want to be able to answer Joshua's questions about the world as he grows up. The other day he asked me about the energy crisis. I really couldn't tell him much because I don't understand it. And now, coming into this class all I hear about is energy and information. It sounds to me like there is no energy crisis. There is energy everywhere." (click on rainbow picture to see video of children making a model of a light beam)

"Energy is abundant in universe. You are right. It is just that we have depended on one kind of energy source that is finite. There is a limit to how much fossil fuel there is under the surface of the earth. There is only so much oil available. We didn't realize this soon enough."

"The news media is flooded with news about rising gasoline prices, with stories about disastrous things that are going to happen in the near future because we are running out of oil." She found herself frightened and overwhelmed again. She often wondered what life was going to be like for Joshua's children and their children. Would we ever get out from under these terrible times? she asked herself frequently.

"I'm an optimist. I think we can make it but it isn't going to be easy. Our children are going to have to understand nature's ways much better than the schools are preparing them to if they are going to solve the problems we have created. To my way of thinking, if our children understood that energy and information are what is between nature and themselves then they would not be put off by science. They would realize that universe is full of energy. Energy is everywhere. To me, this one realization would inspire them to find other sources of energy. There is no shortage. Not really."

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All right reserved - Judy Wilken MS - 2010

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