Light is all around us. It’s so fast that to our human eyes it seems instantaneous. However, if you look up at the night sky at the stars you are seeing light that is only just reaching us from millions and billions of miles away. Light, in particular sunlight, is a creator and sustaining element for life on earth. It can heat us but also burns. It’s why so many buildings like to use Brise Soleil, like that from alusystems.uk/ to deflect its direct rays and create natural shade. What actually makes up light?
Light can be described as any electromagnetic radiation. It’s made up of pretty much any wavelength and sometimes it’s visible, sometimes it’s not. You could say that gamma rays, x rays that we use for medical scanning and even radio waves are just forms of light. Light reaches us incredibly fast. In a vacuum, with nothing to stop it, it’s been calculated that it travels at 186282.3970512 miles per second. Now you can see why the Millennium Falcon was able to move so fast.
We need light and since ancient times have tried to create it. Most of our light comes from the sun but this is not always present, so we turned to fire at first, the burning of fossil fuels and then electrically generated high volume light, like that from an LED light. Light also moves strangely, it can come as waves or as particles Our understanding of it has helped us with much of modern physics today.
