Every summer I try to keep up with all my studies and school work, but I also devote myself to some field of knowledge unrelated to mine (meaning: not ancient history, languages, literatures, and religions) just for the fun of it. Last year it was oceanology. I'm still very interested in that, but this year I'm wanting to dig a little deeper into some of the abstract scientific principles behind all scientific observations, not just oceanology, but astronomy and geology as well. Anyhow, last night I thought it would be fun to do some science experiments together. So I took Elijah to Lowe's and he got his own mini-Maglite flashlight.
When we got home, we played around with reflecting light. It was already past 8 o'clock, so the house was nice and dark when we turned the lights off. I laid my own Maglite on a pillow on the floor in my bedroom and left the door open, while Elijah and I were sitting on the floor in the living room, letting the beam of the flashlight shine on us. I had set my globe down on the floor across the house (that means: beyond the living room and on the far end of the library), so that there was a 90-degree angle made between the globe (in the library) and the flashlight (in the bedroom). Then we got out Cacey's beauty-mirror. And we tried reflecting the light-beam from the bedroom into the library to light upon the globe. Then we aimed it at other things.
Then we did another experiment with reflection. After trying briefly to explain to Elijah that light-waves themselves are invisible to the eye unless they're reflecting off of something, we went into the kitchen and put some tinfoil over the end of his flashlight so that no light could get out. But we had punched a small hole in the tinfoil first, so a thin beam of light was getting out. Then we turned off the lights in the kitchen. Obviously, at first, the light-beam coming out of the flashlight was not visible:
But then we took a spoonfull of flour and blew it so that its dust spread out through the path of the light beam, and we suddenly had a light-saber! (Yes, I did actually use Star Wars to try to explain a little of this to him in an exciting way. We even listened to a Star Wars soundtrack in the car on the way to Lowe's.)
Here's another image. In this one you can see that the floating flour had not yet reached out more than several inches beyond the flashlight and so the light-beam disappears on the right of the picture.
In this one the dust had almost settled, but the light-beam was still just barely visible:
Next, we wanted to bend light (refraction). So we got a shoebox from the closet. Cacey was nice enough to donate it even though it was holding a very nice pair of shoes she wore at our wedding. We took a box cutter and cut two vertical slits in one end. Then we laid a piece of white paper inside it. We filled a tall glass with water and set it in the middle of the box. Then Cacey had the brilliant idea of putting food coloring in the water. We turned the lights off again, and pointed the flashlight at the slits, from outside the box, to make the light go through the water in the glass and land on the box's other end, as so:
By angling the flashlight a little bit, we were able to refract the light and make two separate beams that crossed each other:
After we put Elijah to bed, Cacey and I were talking about how amazing the world is and how God was so obviously showing off his greatness when he designed everything. I guess I ended up doing theology anyhow...
O yeah, Elijah this morning woke up his mommy---a bazillion months pregnant, mind you---with his new flashlight... It wasn't a pretty site.
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