Here’s something I was thinking about the other day while I was sobbing over the pathetic winter we’ve had so far. Color. More specifically change in color. In most cases a change in color of some object isn’t really a change in color at all, but more of a color diffusion of sorts. Let me explain a little more.


Remember back in your elementary school days when you took art class and painted some black stick-house comprised of a square and an isosceles triangle with two windows and a door with your little stick-family standing in front of it? No doubt, you learned then that when you mixed the blue paint with the yellow you got green paint and when you mixed the red paint with the blue paint you got purple paint, etc. You know; the whole primary colors thing. Well I bet you never thought about what actually was happening there.


Let’s advance a few years to high school chemistry. Remember learning about a physical change vs. a chemical change? You probably melted some ice and called it a physical change and burned some paper and called it a chemical change. Well you did good there sonny, until it came to color changes. Sometimes, a color change was physical and other times it was chemical and you didn’t really know which one it was so you guessed or made sure your circle covered both physical and chemical so you could argue your case as to what you circled depending on which one was actually correct.


Now let’s combine the two lessons. Back in art class, you mixed two paints (containing the same chemical structure) of different color and got the same paint, but with a new color. Well, that’s not exactly what happened. Theoretically you still have red paint and blue paint, but the paint molecules are so close together that it appears purple. Your eyes can’t tell that there are multiple colored molecules. Because the molecules are so randomly mixed and packed together, it just appears as one solid color. It’s sort of like way back in the day when you used Paint on that old 386, 32-color, IBM computer of yours. You needed different shaded of gray so you would paint with a “dark gray” that had more black dots in it than white dots, and a “light gray” that had more white dots than black dots in it. From afar it looked like different shades of gray, but really it was always just black and white dots.


When color change occurs like this, it is a purely physical change. The molecular structure of your paint isn’t changing; it is just getting scrambled around. Liquids and gases do this constantly. We just don’t notice it because it’s always the same color. Put a drop of food coloring in your water without stirring and you’ll notice there is always a continuous motion in the liquid. The food coloring isn’t bonding with water; it is just being dispersed into it. A physical change. The water isn’t actually changing in color; it is just spreading the molecules of the food coloring out to make the food coloring appear lighter in color.


So the next time you see something of color, take a closer look and see if the color is what it is, or just a mixture of other colors that are so tightly packed together, your eyes can’t tell the difference. Unless of course your object is light, in which case we have to talk about something completely different in the form of wave energy. And so begins the great contrast of particles vs. waves. Ah Max Planck would be so happy!

I am literally able to bend light! Okay, so maybe it's really not as cool as it sounds. I mean really anybody can bend light. All you need is a lens, or prism, or water, or mirror, or the list could go on and on. I guess really even inanimate objects can bend light. Objects such as black holes, stars and even planets have enough mass to literally bend a ray of light like it were a piece of rubber. What makes me able to do it in a much cooler fashion is the fact that I can only bend blue light and I can do it simply by moving my head and keeping my eyes still. Freaky huh? Here's what's going on.

As you can tell from my pictures, I wear eye-glasses to help me see. I cling to them like a child would a blanket. I'm not sure what your vision has to be for a person to be considered legally blind but I've got to be close. I mean I can't even read the big E on the eye doctor's chart. I'm pretty sure in order to check my vision without glasses would require an entire billboard with letters approximately the size of OJ Simpson's lies. Anywho, since my eye site is so bad, I pay a little extra to have special poly-something-or-other lenses that will not be half an inch thick when cut. These lenses are actually stronger and lighter than the typical plastic lens. Now, if you own a pair of glasses you've probably realized that around the edges of the lenses the lens gets a little thicker. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it is definitely the case with mine. To top things off, my glasses are more of a rounded rectangle than circular. Put all these things together and my glasses end up bending the blue portion of the visible light spectrum towards the outside of the lenses. This can be most noticeable when staring at purple light made from blue and red light.

Basically what happens is as I look at this type of purple light thru the edges of my glasses the blue and red light will split apart and I'll be able to easily identify both colors. It sort of looks like those red/blue images do before you put the 3D glasses on to make the image pop out at you. Even some halogen white light will magically have the blue light bent away from it. While I'm not entirely thrilled with this effect, it is sort of neat. What's really weird is when staring at pure blue light, such as a blue LED, by merely moving my head I can bend the light right off the emitter so the emitter appears dark and a bright spot of blue light appears floating a couple inches away. Just one more reason why people think I'm a loon and could really care less about reading this blog.