Category: Interests and hobbies

When I write about magic, I try to find roots for how the “supernatural” works in the real world of physics. Invisibility becomes about bending light beams. Spells use words that vibrate oxygen molecules into becoming dense enough to carry the weight of humans as “air cushions.” I may not always address these explanations in my stories, but they exist in my head.

Is all magic make-belief? Well, that depends. If you define magic as things that occur even if you have no earthly explanation for them YET, then magic most definitely exists.

I never did finish my physics degree, which is not to say I’m a total stranger to the wonderful and weird world we live in. Many things are too bizarre for human minds to comprehend at first.

Let’s take the photoelectric effect. (Stick with me, ‘cos this one’s easy. Ish.)

In simple terms, metal emits electrons (which can be measured as a current) when light shines upon it. This is called the photoelectric effect.
So light can produce electricity. Makes sense. After all we refer to light as “electromagnetic radiation.”

You would expect high intensity light, i.e. a lot of light, to produce more current than low intensity light. Once upon a time, this was what scientists believed, too.

That’s not what happens, though. Uh uh. You can shine a lot of red light onto a metal without producing a current, whereas a dim blue light may very well yield electricity.

Magic?

Einstein suggested this photoelectric effect is nothing to do with intensity. It’s all about energy. Red light doesn’t carry a lot of energy, while blue light does.

Even more bizarre, it takes a “minimum” amount of energy to get the electron party started, and specific multiples to amp up the volume. It’s not like the volume on your old car stereo, which goes up and up continuously as you rotate the knob. With the photoelectric effect, there is no “continuously.” Light energy comes in packets – photons – of specific energies, what are known as quanta.

Imagine the metal is a hill. At the top is a house, where two lazy teenage electrons veg in their mother’s basement all day. The mother wants to rouse her sons into action, so she sends her twenty light brothers, all over 70 years of age, to get the teen electrons off their backsides. But the brothers are old and simply don’t have the energy to climb the hill.(Lots of intensity but little energy = no electrons).

So the mother sends her nephews. She only has six Of them, but they are in their 40s and the hill is no big deal for them. They get into the basement and give the kids a good talking to neither of them will ever forget.(Less intensity but more energy = current flows)

The mother has two other sons, just as lazy, who live on a much bigger hill. The nephews ascended the first slope with ease, but their backs and knees give out halfway up the second hill. The desperate mother calls a distant cousin, who sends his two daughters, both in their twenties and full of energy, to deal with the lazy boys. What can two young women do that six older men couldn’t? Well, climb the hill for starters. Heck, they don’t even notice the incline, that’s how fit they are. (Even less intensity but much more energy = more current flows)

Einstein won the Nobel Prize for this. Clearly he didn’t word his theory like I did, but then he was a real scientist, and not an author.