Light Tour of Milledgeville and Spectral Tubes

Figure 1: Light Tour of Milledgeville

Supplemental Instruction
Jennifer, the SI will be available to help with concepts.
SI meets in Kilpatrick 223 from 5:00-6:30 pm.

Reading
Read Chapter 6: Trefil textbook: Waves and Electromagnetic Radiation.
View other reources, such as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLNM8zI4Q_M
Jennifer Deardorff will be available for SI to help with concepts.


Light Tour of Milledgeville
The image above (Figure 1) shows what you observed for some light sources during the tour.
The image below illustrates the questions that you posed from the Light Tour.

 Figure 1: Questions from Light Tour

Using information from the readings, the discussion, the SI sessions, and other resources, please respond to the following questions:

1. Choose a question from the list that you have an interest in understanding. What do you suppose is a reasonable scientific explanation for the phenomenon that you observed associated with that question.

2. Which of the following is a characteristic of high-energy radiation? For each option, briefly describe your rationale for choosing or not choosing the option.
(a) long wavelengths 
(b) high velocity 
(c) high frequency 
(d) high amplitude 
(e) all of the above

3. A photon is a packet of light. Can you describe light as a packets? Provide scientific justification for your response.

4. Who was Planck? What was his contribution to the understanding of light?

5. Calculate the frequency of a wave that has energy of 1.32 x 10^-23 J/photon.
(please show correct SI units and all work for full credit)

6. A photon is a packet of light. Mercury gas shows several types of photons including an intense green spectral line at 546 nm. Recall that 1 nm = 1 nanometer. Calculate the energy (in J) of a single photon of green light.  (please show correct SI units and all work for full credit)



Spectral Tubes
We also "looked" at spectral tubes, namely hydrogen, helium, neon, carbon dioxide, and argon.

Using the data above and other resources answer the following questions (note that you can find spectral images online similar to what you observed during class):

1. What do you observe that is similar and/or different between the gases?


2. What do you think the colored lines represent in the spectral tubes?


3. What do you think the dark spaces between the color lines represent?


Below is an image of the spectral lines from the sun, hydrogen gas, helium gas, mercury gas and uranium gas as a reference.