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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Crystal Field Theory
Tuesday. 2.21.12 4:14 pm
I finally got a library card for the university library. I celebrated by checking out a bunch of books on desert environments, crystal field theory, and aerosols. My first victim was the crystal field theory book, because I'm doing some free-lance spectroscopy on Mercury and I need it to figure out my positions on important issues, like whether Mercury is dark because it is covered in opaque titanium oxides or whether magnesium sulfates are what's goin' down there.

Spectroscopy is cool. Here's how it works. You've probably seen the shell model of the atom. A bunch of protons and neutrons crowded together in the nucleus, and then electrons buzzing around them in different shell levels above. Where there are groups of atoms, another atom can steal the electron from the first and they can become ionically bonded. It's a simplified model. Electrons actually have pretty complicated "orbitals", or regions in which they are most often found, within their "shells". Some orbitals are shell-like, others are elongated balloon-shaped loops. The electrons appear in different orbitals depending on how many electrons the atom has. Once the shell-like orbitals are filled, they move into the loopy orbitals, and so on. In a crystal lattice, many different atoms are bonded together in a repeating pattern. Because of the effects of neighboring atoms, the bonds are not always formed at ideal angles, and some atoms get stretched in strange ways. Sometimes their orbitals start to overlap, allowing electrons to move between them or to move between different orbitals in the same atom. Electrons also have different energy levels that they can occupy, and if they receive a jolt of energy they can enter a higher energy state. However, if the electron doesn't get exactly the right amount of energy to bring it into the next state, it can't go there. Too much or too little energy won't do the trick.

The energy that the electron needs to move into higher energy states can be imparted when a photon (a particle of light) strikes the mineral. Photons travel as waves with different wavelengths. Each wavelength corresponds to an energy. High energy photons are gamma rays and X-rays. Slightly lower energy are photons in the ultra-violet (UV) part of the spectrum. Next comes the visible part of the spectrum that you and I can see, starting with the highest energy (blue light) and ending with the lowest visible energy (red light). We have special molecules in our eyes which are suited for interacting with photons in this range of wavelengths, which allows us to see color. Just to the low energy side of what we can see is the infra-red. You can buy film and take pictures of things in the infra-red, which is actually fascinating because all vegetation appears bright white. We can't see infra-red light with our eyes, but we can feel it with our skin in the form of heat. This is why hot coals glow red-- they are emitting so much energy in the form of heat that some gets emitted in a slightly higher energy range: visible red light. ["Colder" stars are also red. Our sun is yellow, and very very hot stars are blue.] The infrared was discovered by William Herschel, an astronomer. He was measuring the room temperature and he noticed that if he measured red light coming from his prism the temperature went up. If he held the thermometer just to the right of the red light, it went up even higher. An invisible color of light, detectable as heat! He also discovered Uranus and several moons of Saturn and Uranus in his spare time (what do you do with your spare time)? At lower energies (and longer wavelengths) we run into microwaves. Finally, with really long wavelengths and low energies are radio waves. All these things are just other words for photons of various wavelengths, and together they make up what we call the "electromagnetic spectrum":



While a mineral may be bathed in the light of the whole spectrum (white light), it only absorbs photons that have exactly the right amount of energy to bump its electrons up to the next energy level. Depending on what elements are present, and where they are in the crystal structure, the mineral as a whole absorbs characteristic parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, mostly between the UV region and the mid-infrared. Much longer wavelength photons pass right through the material, while ones with much shorter wavelengths (X-rays and gamma rays) pass through the material until they run into something dense (like your bones). Most of the light in the right range is simply reflected. By measuring all of the light that gets reflected off of the mineral, you can see what it is made of, and how its crystal structure is arranged. Here is a hard-to-read graph of a bunch of common materials:



It's supposed to say, "feldspars, olivine, metal, and pyroxene". The horizontal axis is the wavelength of light, and the vertical axis is the amount of light reflected (usually compared to the amount of light that shone on the object, to get rid of the influence of the light source). The ones besides metal are very common rocks on the Moon. You can see that for each mineral there are characteristic parts of the electromagnetic spectrum where they absorb light. In the visible range, this defines their color. If they absorb everything but green, all of the green light will be reflected, and that will be the color of the mineral. If they reflect lots of red light, the mineral will be red. That is how the color of everything you see is made. By looking at rocks this way, we can tell what the Moon is made of just by collecting the light that reflects off of it from the Sun. So why are the absorptions deep, wide U's instead of very narrow blips where the energy level is just right? Well a major reason is because of heat. When something is heated up, its molecules start to vibrate. As the molecules in a crystal lattice vibrate, sometimes their electron orbitals start to overlap more or interact, reducing or augmenting the amount of energy required to jump between energy levels. So depending on how the lattice is vibrating, the atom can absorb photons on either side of its "ideal" wavelength, making a big U with the ideal wavelength at the bottom.

Here is the a spectrum for plants:



You can see that the least absorption is in the green part of the spectrum, which is why plants are green.

Sapphires can be many different colors depending on small trace amounts of metals that substitute into their structures:




And that is all of spectroscopy and crystal field theory in the space of a Nutang entry.

Good Night.

Recommended by 1 Member
middaymoon
8 Comments.


I'm depressed by how much of this I already knew. >.>
» middaymoon on 2012-02-21 11:56:44

Also, you read The Golden Compass? Was it obnoxious?
» middaymoon on 2012-02-22 12:00:06

I read it and saw the movie, I wasn't a fan haha. It was definitely more anti-establishment than anti-church, but not completely. Mostly it turns anti-God. If you consider the fact that the "church" was ultimately trying to divide people from their animal spirits in an effort to make them perfect, (the same way Christianity seeks to divide us from our sinful natures) then the whole book turns into an argument, basically saying that what Christians consider "sin" is a natural part of us and that we should embrace it because it's what makes us human. Plus, the main character was just...a complete brat. Everything she did was for her own gain, even at the cost of others. She was stubborn, prideful, deceitful, etc. I disliked her immensely. If the author was trying to make a point about how "sin" is a good thing, he choose a crappy character to bring that across. Plus, I've heard that the series ultimately leads up to the girl's plan to kill God, stuff like that. Just really awful.

PFF I don't expect to ever out-write you! You like Physics too much to get confused by the likes of Quantum Mechanics and such things.
» middaymoon on 2012-02-22 05:24:09

:0 I'm sorry I ruined the plot for you! Yeah it's freaky. The whole series was a mad response to The Chronicles of Narnia. I'm just really not a fan haha
» middaymoon on 2012-02-22 11:07:46

!! When can I preorder?
» middaymoon on 2012-02-23 01:44:26

Oddly enough, I followed everything you just said (odd because I've studied this before, and it was more difficult, not because you were unclear). It's interesting, how relatively easy it is to change the colour of something... We had a project in my chem class that dealt with using a mass spectrometer...not the most interesting thing, on its own, but the applications of the visible spectrum? Crazy!

re: Psychiatry or neurosurgery--I'm honestly not too certain, yet, but there's time! It's just so much more interesting to me. Also, I get cuddles from everyone, so we're good on the cuddles and such...honestly I'm just a pooper about distance and my biggest problem was the caps, whereas everything else is just some crazy angry DON'T WANT YOUR LOOOVE speech to make me less bothered by someone telling his friends about me, after doing a bunch of damage.
BUT THAT'S ANOTHER STORY, I loved the rejection method, and the tough love is much appreciated. Bah. :D
» Unicornasaurus on 2012-02-24 03:11:22

I feel somewhat accomplished for having known some of the information in here prior to reading it.
» randomjunk on 2012-02-24 03:29:58

That's a good joke.
» randomjunk on 2012-02-24 02:40:38

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