You will now create an outline for your final assignment.
In this lesson you learned about how light waves interact with matter by reflecting and scattering, transmitting and refracting, and absorbing. You took notes on almost every page of the lesson, and now it's time to use them, as well as any other evidence presented, to compose your own multimedia project, or write a final essay, in which you describe and summarize all of that knowledge about interactions with light that you've collected.
As you compose your project, try to think of ways to connect, either graphically or in writing, the five different ways that light energy interacts with matter. One idea is to create a comic strip or labeled drawings that illustrate reflection, refraction, scattering, transmission and absorption in an organized way.
If you create a multimedia project that requires a social-media, video, or audio platform that is not directly offered by this lesson, you will need to post it to a file-sharing site (Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Teams are examples) and then upload the link to the Write It plug-in. Here are some ideas for what you might want to do:
• Take images from the lesson to create an Instagram or animation storyboard.
• Expand your notes and turn them into a script for a podcast.
• Compose and perform a rap or poetry slam.
• Make a video of yourself providing an oral explanation or commentary.
Use Organize It to outline your ideas. You can review your notes in “My Work” as well as any of the following videos and glossary terms.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |
Take a look. What you are seeing is not exactly that apple. What you are seeing is light energy interacting with the apple, being detected by your eye and interpreted by your brain. Different objects have different properties that absorb, reflect and even allow light energy to pass through.
But not all wavelengths of energy do the same thing in every given object or medium.
This red apple absorbs all visible wavelengths of light energy except the red. The result? Red wavelengths are reflected to our eye and the apple looks red to us.
A green apple looks green because it reflects the green wavelengths.
Some matter allows light energy to go through it (a glass of water) and as it does, the energy interacts with the matter and its speed and trajectory change depending on the angle it hits. This is called refraction. The result? That cool broken-straw illusion, why you are no good at spearfishing, and best of all, the lens on your eyeball that allows you to see.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |
Light is energy-- electromagnetic energy to be exact-- that travels in waves. Whether it is visible or invisible to our eyes, light energy is interacting with the objects and mediums all around us: it is being reflected, refracted, transmitted and absorbed.
And that last one- absorption- is particularly interesting because as that light energy absorbs into the object or medium, it transfers its energy and the object or medium heats up. It’s why the sun on your skin feels warm, why that heat lamp keeps your pet lizard happy, and why microwaves heat your food; electromagnetic waves are absorbed and transfer their energy.
But the amount of energy transfer depends on three main things-- how intense or bright your light is, how long that light interacts with the object, and how many wavelengths of the light your object is absorbing. The brighter the light, the longer the time and darker the object or medium, the more light energy will be absorbed and the hotter things get.
So that black shirt on a sunny day while waiting for a ride on that hot new roller coaster? Probably not the best choice- and all because of light energy and absorption.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |
Light energy interacts with everything around us. And one of the main ways it does, is by hitting an object or medium and bouncing off. This is called reflection.
But reflection comes in different flavors- so to speak-- depending on what wavelengths of light are being reflected, what type of object or surface they are interacting with (big/small, smooth/bumpy) and the directions in which they are being bounced.
When visible light bounces off a smooth surface, the light reflects with very little interference in a predictable direction. The result? A mirror image. (mirror)
But if that surface is bumpy or uneven the wavelengths bounce in many different directions--this type of reflection is called scattering-- and it’s the way we see most things around us. (red apple)
And this light scattering, when applied to teeny objects-- on the scale of molecules -- can produce some amazing things. The most famous of which is a result of blue wavelengths of light scattering off of air molecules (blue sky).
Absorption of some wavelengths and scattering or reflection of others is how we see what we see. It’s the reason for those skies of blue and clouds of white.