Re: Peterson's Death Sentence

From: John Woodgate (jmw_at_jmwa.demon.contraspam.yuk)
Date: 01/29/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 20:20:47 +0000

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Fields <jfields@austininstrum
ents.com> wrote (in <fmonv0pbfeq2oq51b9btf9nqf5f8oprg71@4ax.com>) about
'Peterson's Death Sentence', on Sat, 29 Jan 2005:

>Frayed knot. Color is caused by an electron's dropping from one
>_discrete_ energy level to another, thus generating a photon which
>carries off that quantum of energy and vibrates at a particular
>wavelength.

For a particular electron, yes, but there are rather a lot of electrons.
Even in one piece of material, the influence of the electric fields from
other atoms causes 'line-splitting' so that electrons making nominally
the same transition in fact have slightly different energies.

Consider the famous yellow line in the spectrum of sodium. If all the
transitions were of exactly the same energy, the line would be
infinitely narrow in the spectrum space and we would not see it.

Then in another piece of material, the electrons can have transition
energies as close as you like to those in the first piece, so the
overall result is that spectral colours form a continuous spectrum. 

-- 
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. 
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

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