Light

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: December 15, 2021.

Were you ever scared of the dark? It's not surprising if you were, or if you still are today,
because humans are creatures of the light
light, deeply programmed through millions of years of
history to avoid the dark dangers of the night. Light is vitally important to us, but we don't
always take the trouble to understand it. Why does it make some things appear to be
different colors from others? Does it travel as particles or as waves? Why does it move so
quickly? Let's take a closer look at some of these questions—let's shed some light on light!

Photo: Ordinary light looks white, but if you shine it through a prism (wedge) of glass, you can see that it's really
made from a whole spectrum of colors.

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Contents

1. What is light?

2. Is light a particle or a wave?

3. How light behaves

Reflection

Refraction

Diffraction

Interference

4. Where does light come from?

5. How atoms make light

6. How light really works

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 7. Hot light and cold light

8. Light of many colors

9. It's not how it is—it's how you see it

10. Find out more

What is light?
When we're very young, we have a very simple idea about light: the world is either light or
dark and we can change from one to the other just by flicking a switch on the wall. But we
soon learn that light is more complex than this.

Light arrives on our planet after a speedy trip from the Sun, 149 million km (93 million miles
away). Light travels at 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second, so the light you're seeing now
was still tucked away in the Sun about eight minutes ago. Put it another way, light takes
roughly twice as long to get from the Sun to Earth as it does to make a cup of coffee!

Light is a kind of energy

But why does light make this journey at all? As you probably know, the Sun is a nuclear
fireball spewing energy in all directions. The light that we see it simply the one part of the
energy that the Sun makes that our eyes can detect. When light travels between two places
(from the Sun to the Earth or from a flashlight to the sidewalk in front of you on a dark night),
energy makes a journey between those two points. The energy travels in the form of waves
(similar to the waves on the sea but about 100 million times smaller)—a vibrating pattern of
electricity and magnetism that we call electromagnetic energy
energy. If our eyes could see
electricity and magnetism, we might see each ray of light as a wave of electricity vibrating in
one direction and a wave of magnetism vibrating at right angles to it. These two waves would
travel in step and at the speed of light.
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Solar flare from the Sun

Picture: Light energy likes to travel outwards! Most natural light floods into our world from the Sun, shown here in
a dramatic closeup, emitting a blast of radiation called a solar flare. Photo courtesy of NASA Solar Dynamics
Observatory (SDO) .

Is light a particle or a wave?

For hundreds of years, scientists have argued over whether light is really a wave at all. Back
in the 17th century, the brilliant English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727)—one of the
first people to study the matter in detail—thought light was a stream of "corpuscles" or
particles
particles. But his great rival, a no-less-brilliant Dutchman named Christiaan Huygens
(1629–1695), was quite adamant that light was made up of waveswaves.
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Isaac Newton

Photo: Isaac Newton argued that light was a stream of particles. Picture by William Thomas Fry courtesy of US
Library of Congress.

Thus began a controversy that still rumbles on today—and it's easy to see why. In some ways,
light behaves just like a wave: light reflects off a mirror, for example, in exactly the same way
that waves crashing in from the sea "reflect" off sea walls and go back out again. In other
ways, light behaves much more like a stream of particles—like bullets firing in rapid
succession from a gun. During the 20th century, physicists came to believe that light could be
both a particle and a wave at the same time. (This idea sounds quite simple, but goes by the
rather complex name of wave-particle duality
duality.)

The real answer to this problem is more a matter of philosophy and psychology than physics.
Our understanding of the world is based on the way our eyes and brains interpret it.
Sometimes it seems to us that light is behaving like a wave; sometimes it seems like light is a
stream of particles. We have two mental pigeonholes and light doesn't quite fit into either of
them. It's like the glass slipper that doesn't fit either of the ugly sisters (particle or wave). We
can pretend it nearly fits both of them, some of the time. But in truth, light is simply what it is
—a form of energy that doesn't neatly match our mental scheme of how things should be.
One day, someone will come up with a better way of describing and explaining it that makes
perfect sense in all situations.
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How light behaves

Light waves (let's assume they are indeed waves for now) behave in four particularly
interesting and useful ways that we describe as reflection, refraction, diffraction, and
interference.

Reflection

The most obvious thing about light is that it will reflect off things. The only reason we can see
the things around us is that light, either from the Sun or from something like an electric lamp
here on Earth, reflects off them into our eyes. Cut off the source of the light or stop it from
reaching your eyes and those objects disappear. They don't cease to exist, but you can no
longer see them.
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James Webb telescope. Six blue mirror segments.

Photo: Now that's what I call a mirror! In fact, it's six segments of the huge mirror from the James Webb Space
Telescope. Picture by courtesy of NASA.

Reflection can happen in two quite different ways. If you have a smooth, highly polished
surface and you shine a narrow beam of light at it, you get a narrow beam of light reflected
back off it. This is called specular reflection and it's what happens if you shine a flashlight
or laser into a mirror: you get a well-defined beam of light bouncing back towards you. Most
objects aren't smooth and highly polished: they're quite rough. So, when you shine light onto
them, it's scattered all over the place. This is called diffuse reflection and it's how we see
most objects around us as they scatter the light falling on them.

If you can see your face in something, it's specular reflection; if you can't see your face, it's
diffuse reflection. Polish up a teaspoon and you can see your face quite clearly. But if the
spoon is dirty, all the bits of dirt and dust are scattering light in all directions and your face
disappears.

Read more about this in our article on how mirrors work.

Refraction
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Refraction of laser beams inside crystals

Photo: Laser beams bending (refracting) through a crystal. Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy of US Department of
Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL).

Light waves travel in straight lines through empty space (a vacuum), but more interesting
things happen to them when they travel through other materials—especially when they move
from one material to another. That's not unusual: we do the same thing ourselves.

Have you noticed how your body slows down when you try to walk through water? You go
racing down the beach at top speed but, as soon as you hit the sea, you slow right down. No
matter how hard you try, you cannot run as quickly through water as through air. The dense
liquid is harder to push out of the way, so it slows you down. Exactly the same thing happens
to light if you shine it into water, glass, plastic or another more dense material: it slows down
quite dramatically. This tends to make light waves bend—something we usually call
refraction
refraction.

How refraction works

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 Photo: Refraction makes a drinking straw look bent (the top and bottom appear not to be joined up) when
it's standing in a jug of water..

You've probably noticed that water can bend light. You can see this for yourself by
putting a straw in a glass of water. Notice how the straw appears to kink at the point
where the water meets the air above it. The bending happens not in the water itself but
at the junction of the air and the water. You can see the same thing happening in this
photo of laser light beams shining between two crystals up above. As the beams cross
the junction, they bend quite noticeably.

Why does this happen? You may have learned that the speed of light is always the same,
but that's only true when light travels in a vacuum. In fact, light travels more slowly in
some materials than others. It goes more slowly in water than in air. Or, to put it another
way, light slows down when it moves from air to water and it speeds up when it moves
from water to air. This is what causes the straw to look bent. Let's look into this a bit
more closely.
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 Imagine a light ray zooming along through the air at an angle to some water. Now
imagine that the light ray is actually a line of people swimming along in formation, side-
by-side, through the air. The swimmers on one side are going to enter the water more
quickly than the swimmers on the other side and, as they do so, they are going to slow
down—because people move more slowly in water than in air. That means the whole line
is going to start slowing down, beginning with the swimmers at one side and ending with
the swimmers on the other side some time later. That's going to cause the entire line to
bend at an angle. This is exactly how light behaves when it enters water—and why water
makes a straw look bent.

Refraction is amazingly useful. If you wear eyeglasses, you probably know that the lenses
they contain are curved-shape pieces of glass or plastic that bend (refract) the light from the
things you're looking at. Bending the light makes it seem to come from nearer or further
away (depending on the type of lenses you have), which corrects the problem with your sight.
To put it another way, your eyeglasses fix your vision by slowing down incoming light so it
shifts direction slightly. Binoculars, telescopes, cameras, night vision goggles, and many other
things with lenses work in exactly the same way (collectively we call these things optical
equipment
equipment).
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Although light normally travels in straight lines, you can make it bend round corners by
shooting it down thin glass or plastic pipes called fiber-optic cables. Reflection and refraction
are at work inside these "light pipes" to make rays of light follow an unusual path they
wouldn't normally take.

Diffraction

We can hear sounds bending round doorways, but we can't see round corners—why is that?
Like light, sound travels in the form of waves (they're very different kinds of waves, but the
idea of energy traveling in a wave pattern is broadly the same). Sound waves tend to range in
size from a few centimeters to a few meters, and they will spread out when they come to an
opening that is roughly the same size as they are—something like a doorway, for example. If
sound is rushing down a corridor in your general direction and there's a doorway opening
onto the room where you're sitting, the sound waves will spread in through the doorway and
travel to your ears.

The same thing does not happen with light. But light will spread out in an identical way if you
shine it on a tiny opening that's of roughly similar size to its wavelength. You may have
noticed this effect, which is called diffraction
diffraction, if you screw your eyes up and look at a
streetlight in the dark. As your eyes close, the light seems to spread out in strange stripes as
it squeezes through the narrow gaps between your eyelids and eyelashes. The tighter you
close your eyes, the more the light spreads (until it disappears when you close your eyes
completely).

Artwork: When light from a laser (1) passes through a narrow slit (2), the waves spread out (3) and form a
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diffraction pattern of light and dark bands (4). Different numbers, shapes, and sizes of slits produce more complex
diffraction patterns.

Interference

If you stand above a calm pond (or a bath full of water) and dip your finger in (or allow a single
drop to drip down to the water surface from a height), you'll see ripples of energy spreading
outwards from the point of the impact. If you do this in two different places, the two sets of
ripples will move toward one another, crash together, and form a new pattern of ripples
called an interference pattern. Light behaves in exactly the same way. If two light sources
produce waves of light that travel together and meet up, the waves will interfere with one
another where they cross. In some places the crests of waves will reinforce and get bigger,
but in other places the crest of one wave will meet the trough of another wave and the two
will cancel out.

Photo: Thin-film interference makes the colors you see swirling around on the surface of soap bubbles.

Interference causes effects like the swirling, colored spectrum patterns on the surface of
soap bubbles and the similar rainbow effect you can see if you hold a compact disc up to the
light. What happens is that two reflected light waves interfere. One light wave reflects from
the outer layer of the soap film that wraps around the air bubble, while a second light wave
carries on through the soap, only to reflect off its inner layer. The two light waves travel
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slightly different distances so they get out of step. When they meet up again on the way back
out of the bubble, they interfere. This makes the color of the light change in a way that
depends on the thickness of the soap bubble. As the soap gradually thins out, the amount of
interference changes and the color of the reflected light changes too. Read more about this
in our article on thin-film interference.

Interference is very colorful, but it has practical uses too. A technique called interferometry
can use interfering laser beams to measure incredibly small distances.

Where does light come from?

Welding steel and making sparks

Photo: Arc welding gives off light when metals are melted by an electric current. The atoms are getting quite
excited here! Picture by Martin Wright, courtesy of US Navy.

If you've read our article on energy, you'll know that energy is something that doesn't just
turn up out of the blue: it has to come from somewhere. There is a fixed amount of energy in
the Universe and no process ever creates or destroys energy—it simply turns some of the
existing energy into one or more other forms. This idea is a basic law of physics called the
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conservation of energy and it applies to light as much as anything else. So where then does
light comes from? How exactly do you "make" light?

It turns out that light is made inside atoms when they get "excited". That's not excited in the
silly, giggling sense of the word, but in a more specialized scientific sense. Think of the
electrons inside atoms as a bit like fireflies sitting on a ladder. When an atom absorbs energy,
for one reason or another, the electrons get promoted to higher energy levels. Visualize one
of the fireflies moving up to a higher rung on the ladder. Unfortunately, the ladder isn't quite
so stable with the firefly wobbling about up there, so the fly takes very little persuading to
leap back down to where it was before. In so doing, it has to give back the energy it absorbed
—and it does that by flashing its tail.

That's pretty much what happens when an atom absorbs energy. An electron inside it jumps
to a higher energy level, but makes the atom unstable. As the electron returns to its original
level, it gives back the energy as a flash of light called a photon
photon.

How atoms make light

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 Atoms are the tiny particles from which all things are made. Simplified greatly, an atom
looks a bit like our solar system, which has the Sun at its center and planets orbiting
around it.

Most of the atom's mass is concentrated in the nucleus at the center (red), made from
protons and neutrons packed together.

Electrons (blue) are arranged around the nucleus in shells (sometimes called orbitals, or
energy levels). The more energy an electron has, the farther it is from the nucleus.

Atoms make light in a three-step process:

1. They start off in their stable "ground state" with electrons in their normal places.

2. When they absorb energy, one or more electrons are kicked out farther from the
nucleus into higher energy levels. We say the atom is now "excited."

3. However, an excited atom is unstable and quickly tries to get back to its stable,
ground state. So it gives off the excess energy it originally gained as a photon of
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 energy (wiggly line): a packet of light.

How light really works

Once you understand how atoms take in and give out energy, the science of light makes
sense in a very interesting new way. Think about mirrors, for example. When you look at a
mirror and see your face reflected, what's actually going on? Light (maybe from a window) is
hitting your face and bouncing into the mirror. Inside the mirror, atoms of silver (or another
very reflective metal) are catching the incoming light energy and becoming excited. That
makes them unstable, so they throw out new photons of light that travel back out of the
mirror towards you. In effect, the mirror is playing throw and catch with you using photons of
light as the balls!

The same idea can help us explain things like photocopiers and solar panels (flat sheets of the
chemical element silicon that turn sunlight into electricity). Have you ever wondered why
solar panels look black even when they're in full sunlight? That's because they're reflecting
back little or none of the light that falls on them and absorbing all the energy instead. (Things
that are black absorb light, and reflect little or none, while things that are white reflect
virtually all the light that falls on them, and absorb little or none. That's why it's best to wear
white clothes on a scorching hot day.) Where does the energy go in a solar panel if it's not
reflected? If you shine sunlight onto the solar cells in a solar panel, the atoms of silicon in the
cells catch the energy from the sunlight. Then, instead of producing new photons, they
produce a flow of electricity instead through what's known as the photoelectric (or
photovoltaic) effect. In other words, the incoming solar energy (from the Sun) is converted to
outgoing electricity.

Hot light and cold light

What would make an atom absorb energy in the first place? You might give it some energy by
heating it up. If you put an iron bar in a blazing fire, the bar would eventually heat up so much
that it glowed red hot. What's happening is that you're supplying energy to the iron atoms
inside the bar and getting them excited. Their electrons are being promoted to higher energy
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levels and making the atoms unstable. As the electrons return to lower levels, they're giving
off their energy as photons of red light—and that's why the bar seems to glow red. The fire
gives off light for exactly the same reason.

Old-style electric lamps work this way too. They make light by passing electricity through a
very thin wire filament so it gets incredibly hot. Excited atoms inside the hot filament turn
the electrical energy passing through them into light you can see by constantly giving off
photons. When we make light by heating things, that's called incandescence
incandescence. So old-style
lamps are sometimes called incandescent lamps.

A blue-green glow stick using chemoluminescence

Photo: A glow stick makes "cold light" using luminescence. Photo by Demetrius Kennon courtesy of US Navy.

You can also get atoms excited in other ways. Energy-saving light bulbs that use
fluorescence are more energy efficient because they make atoms crash about and collide,
making lots of light without making heat. In effect, they make cold light rather than the hot
light produced by older-style, energy-wasting bulbs. Creatures like fireflies make their light
through a chemical process using a substance called luciferin. The broad name for the
various different ways of making light by exciting the atoms inside things is luminescence.

(Let's note in passing that light has some other interesting effects when it gets involved in
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chemistry. That's how photochromic sunglass lenses work.)

Light of many colors

Photo of a rainbow.

Photo: A rainbow splits sunlight ("white" light) into its component colors because it bends different colors
(wavelengths of light) by different amounts. Shorter wavelengths are bent more than longer wavelengths, so blue
light is bent more than red. That's why blue is always on the inside of a rainbow and red is on the outside.

Color (spelled "colour" in the UK) is one of the strangest things about light. Here's one
obvious riddle: if we see things because sunlight is reflected off them, how come everything
isn't the same color? Why isn't everything the color of sunlight? You probably know the
answer to this already. Sunlight isn't light of just one color—it's what we call white light, made
up of all the different colors mixed together. We know this because we can see rainbows
rainbows,
those colorful curves that appear in the sky when droplets of water split sunlight into its
component colors by refracting (bending) different colors of light by different amounts.

Why does a tomato look red? When sunlight shines on a tomato, the red part of the sunlight
is reflected back again off the tomato's skin, while all the other colors of lights are absorbed
(soaked into) the tomato, so you don't see them. That's just as true of a blue book, which
reflects only the blue part of sunlight but absorbs light of other colors.
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Why does a tomato appear red and not blue or green? Think back to how atoms make light.
When sunlight falls on a tomato, the incoming light energy excites atoms in the tomato's skin.
Electrons are promoted to higher energy levels to capture the energy, but soon fall back
down again. As they do so, they give off photons of new light—and that just happens to
correspond to the kind of light that our eyes see as red. Tomatoes, in other words, are like
precise optical machines programmed to produce photons of red light when sunlight falls on
them.

If you shone light of other colors on tomatoes, what would happen? Let's suppose you made
some green light by passing sunlight through a piece of green plastic (something we call a
filter
filter). If you shone this on a red tomato, the tomato would appear black. That's because
tomatoes absorb green light. There is simply no red light for them to reflect.

Photo: A tomato reflects the red part of sunlight and absorbs all the other colors.

It's not how it is—it's how you see it

Many of the things we think are true of the world turn out to be true only of ourselves. We
think tomatoes are red, but in fact we only see them that way. If our eyes were built
differently, we might see the light photons that tomatoes produce as light of a totally
different color. And there's no real way any of us can be sure that what we see as "red" is the
same as what anyone else sees as red: there's no way to prove that my red is the same as
yours. Some of the most interesting aspects of the things we see come down to the
psychology of perception (how our eyes see the world and how our brains make sense of
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that), not the physics of light. Color blindness and optical illusions are two examples of this.

Understanding light is a brilliant example of what being a scientist is all about. Science isn't
like other subjects. It's not like history (a collection of facts about past events) or law (the
rights and wrongs of how people behave). It's an entirely different way of thinking about the
world and making sense of it. When you understand the science of light, you feel you've
turned part of the world inside out—you're looking from the inside, seeing everything in a
totally new way, and understanding for the first time why it all makes sense. Science can
throw a completely different light on the world—it can even throw light on light itself!

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Find out more

On this website

Binoculars

Electromagnetic spectrum

Energy

Fiber optics

Lasers

Lenses

Microscopes

Mirrors

Thermochromic materials

Thin-film interference
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On other websites

Optics for kids: Simple and fun introductory site from the Optical Society of America.

Books

For younger readers

The Illuminating World of Light with Max Axiom, Super Scientist by Emily Sohn and Nick
Derington. Capstone, 2019. A 32-page, app-linked graphic novel (comic-style)
introduction for ages 8–14, aimed at engaging reluctant readers who might not pick up an
ordinary school science book.

Light in a Flash by Georgia Amson-Bradshaw. Rosen, 2019/Franklin Watts, 2017. Facts,

quizzes, and experiments lighten this 32-page introduction for ages 7–9.

A Project Guide to Light and Optics by Colleen Kessler. Mitchell Lane, 2012. A hands-on,
activity-led guide to light for ages 9–12.

Scientific Pathways: Light by Chris Woodford. Rosen, 2013. This is one of my own books,
also for ages 9–12, and it briefly charts the history of our efforts to understand light
(Previously published as Routes of Science: Light, Blackbirch, 2004.)

Horrible Science: Frightening Light by Nick Arnold. Scholastic, 1999. A 160-page, text-led
read for ages 8–12.

Light by David Burnie. DK, 1998. One of the well-known DK Eyewitness books combining
science, technology, and history in an easily digestible volume. Best for ages 9–12 (though
interesting for older people too).

For older readers

General books
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 Light Years: The Extraordinary Story of Mankind's Fascination with Light by Brian Clegg.
Icon, 2015. A whistle-stop tour through the scientific history of light.

Light: A Very Short Introduction by Ian Walmsley. Oxford, 2015. A solid introduction that
takes us (in order) through light rays, waves, duality, relativity, and quantum theory. Quite
a lot is compressed into just over 100 pages so the going (for beginners) isn't always easy.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman. Penguin, 2007
(reprinted in numerous editions). One of the 20th-century's greatest physicists explains
the interactions between light and electrons.

Textbooks

Optics by Eugene Hecht. Addison-Wesley, 2016. The classic undergraduate textbook on

light and optics—and the one I used myself some years ago.

Optics by K.K.Sharma. Academic Press, 2006. An alternative textbook for students, but
with more about optical applications.

Please do NOT copy our articles onto blogs and other websites

Articles from this website are registered at the US Copyright Office. Copying or otherwise using registered works
without permission, removing this or other copyright notices, and/or infringing related rights could make you liable to
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Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2008, 2018. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use.

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