Friday, September 16, 2016

A Barnaby Moment

I woke up this (Friday) and stood up, feeling pretty well rested. It was 1:26 PM, according to the clock in the other room which I can only see after taking a step away from the bed.

Doppler Effect On Sunlight*

This is a third straight day of waking up around 1:30 PM, without the aid of any alarm. Except, the sun, in its capacity as an alarm clock to those who are tuned in to the amount of lumens that the sun throws down, and who can actually perceive when it reaches its maximum intensity.

I think it also has to do with what is called the Doppler Effect in the science of audio; and it might as well be called the same when dealing with light. As the earth begins to revolve away from the sun, there is an actual difference in the speed at which the light from the sun is hitting the earth. At sunrise, we are headed virtually straight towards the first skeins of light that we see; and at noon we are passing perpendicularly to the sun and neither gaining nor losing speed relative to the sun, through the effect of the earth's rotation..

So just like the train whistle that does a dive in pitch as the train whizzes by; the light from the sun does a similar drop in hue as the day whizzes by. The evening hues used to be one of my triggers to start drinking for the night; back when I drank for the night.

* I think that it is not possible for anything in the universe to go faster than the speed of light, even relative to something else, and so I don't know if the earth's rotation has any change on the speed of light as we perceive it....

1 comment:

  1. Actually it's kind of weird; the *speed* of the light stays the same but the frequency, what we perceive as pitch in a musical tone, goes down as the source goes away from us, or goes up as the source approaches us.

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