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An overview of absorption of electromagnetic radiation.This example shows the general principle using visible light as a specific example. A white light source—emitting light of multiple wavelengths—is focused on a sample (the pairs of complementary colors are indicated by the yellow dotted lines).
An example of this phenomenon is when clean air scatters blue light more than red light, and so the midday sky appears blue (apart from the area around the Sun which appears white because the light is not scattered as much). The optical window is also referred to as the "visible window" because it overlaps the human visible response spectrum.
Maxwell discovered that self-propagating electromagnetic waves would travel through space at a constant speed, which happened to be equal to the previously measured speed of light. From this, Maxwell concluded that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation: he first stated this result in 1862 in On Physical Lines of Force.
Passing white light through a prism splits it up into the several colours of light observed in the visible spectrum between 400 nm and 780 nm. If radiation having a frequency in the visible region of the EM spectrum reflects off an object, say, a bowl of fruit, and then strikes the eyes, this results in visual perception of the scene.
In electromagnetic radiation (such as microwaves from an antenna, shown here) the term radiation applies only to the parts of the electromagnetic field that radiate into infinite space and decrease in intensity by an inverse-square law of power, such that the total energy that crosses through an imaginary sphere surrounding the source is the ...
Radiative transfer (also called radiation transport) is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The propagation of radiation through a medium is affected by absorption, emission, and scattering processes. The equation of radiative transfer describes these interactions mathematically. Equations of ...
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The result is that the angles determined by Snell's law also depend on frequency or wavelength, so that a ray of mixed wavelengths, such as white light, will spread or disperse. Such dispersion of light in glass or water underlies the origin of rainbows and other optical phenomena, in which different wavelengths appear as different colors.