Tag Archives: light

Wave watching by proxy — looking at how waves focus light on the sea floor

What is it that we actually look at when we go wave watching? Water is pretty much clear (or at least it is in the spots where I like to go wave watching), so how come we are able to see waves?

What we are looking at are not actually the waves themselves, but at how surfaces oriented in different directions reflect light from different directions towards us, and usually the light isn’t uniformly distributed, so we see lighter and darker areas on the waves that are associated with certain orientations of the surface, i.e. the slopes going up and down to and from the crests.

But this only happens if we look at water at a small angle — then the water surface acts to reflect most of the light from above. However if we look at water at a steep angle, we are actually able to look inside. See this in the picture above? This is due to a phenomenon called total internal reflection.

Now that light easily gets in and out of the water, the water surface does something weird: It acts as a lens and focusses light on the sea floor so we see bright areas and not so bright areas. And looking at how the brightness is distributed on the sea floor, we can figure out what the waves must be to have focussed the light in exactly that way, even though we can’t see the water surface.

Let’s start with an easy example. Below, you see the half circles of concentric waves radiating away from some obstacle at the bottom of the sea wall. The further away from the center you look, the more other waves you notice as the concentric circles become more and more difficult to see.

Moving on to a slightly more difficult case below.

You see the waves radiating away from the seagulls. Behind them, at a shallow angle, you mainly see the ambient light of the sky reflected on the waters surface to let you see the waves. Towards us, though, at a steeper angle, it gets more and more difficult to see the water surface and the waves, but we start seeing the light focussed on the sea floor, mirroring the circles of the waves above.

Here is another example of waves , except this time we see because of reflection of light on the surface further out, vs focussing of light on the sea floor closer to us, except that this time we are not looking at the same waves any more. The waves further out are wind waves and waves the birds made, the waves further in are similar to the ones in the second picture — created by an obstacle at the base of the sea wall.

But then sometimes it gets really difficult to reconcile the waves we see through these two different phenomena. Below, the wave field we see by looking at the light reflected at the surface seems to be dominated by wave crests coming towards us, with the crests being more or less parallel to the sea wall at the bottom of the picture. There is some small stuff going on on top of that, but it doesn’t seem very important.

But now looking at the pattern of light on the sea floor, we pick out something very different: The dominant wave crests are now perpendicular to the sea wall when you look at the middle of the picture below (towards the bottom we see those half circles again that we saw above, too)! Where do those wave crests come from that are perpendicular to the sea wall?

There are actually two things I can think of.

First: they are actually an important part of the wave field, we just don’t pick them up very well because — in contrast to the waves coming towards us with the side going up towards the crest reflecting the dark land behind us and the side going down towards the trough reflecting the bright sky — waves going perpendicularly to that field would mainly reflect the sky, so it would be hard to make out their crests and troughs since they appear to be the same color.

Second: I’m not actually sure this makes sense any more. I was going to say that the surface shape of wave crests moving away from the sun might be more suited to focus light than wave crests moving in a perpendicular direction. But looking at all the examples of circular waves that I posted above and that show up as circles, not just in areas where the wave crest was in specific directions, this probably doesn’t make sense. If anyone is reading this, what do you think??

Below is another example: Here we see a crisscross of waves, a checkerboard pattern of an incoming wave field and its reflection — as long as we look far out onto Kiel fjord. If we look into the water at a steep angle, we see again wave crests that don’t seem to match what we saw on the surface! (btw, don’t let yourself be distracted by the ripples in the sand that might look like they are also caused by light being focussed by the water surface. They are just ripples in the sand…)

Clearly I need to think about this some more to figure out what’s going on here. I’m grateful for any input anyone might have!

Refraction of light in moving water — why stuff seems to be jumping around

I was waking along Kiel fjord one morning and noticed a stone “jump” on the ground as waves went over it (and actually, that observation was the motivation to dive into stuff from the last post, too).

I think the stone only looked so curious because the rest of the ground was uniformly sandy and hence didn’t seem to move.

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So seeing that jumping stone made me want to draw the optical path, which I’ve animated for you here:

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Funny. I think in physics class in school, I would absolutely have hated it had I gotten the task to draw all those different diagrams, and here I really enjoyed it. Maybe because of that jumping stone? Would the right motivation have helped me as a kid to get interested in this? I think it wasn’t that I was not interested in physics, but it would never have occurred to me to sit down on my own to sketch optical paths or anything like that. Now if I could figure out what changed for me, maybe we could use that to make other people interested in physics, too?

Refraction of light in water — looking at a couple of examples

Looking at how light gets refracted when it enters water is always fascinating. There are a dozen blog posts on the topic on this blog alone, but let me talk about it again today.

In a 1908 article, Charles Judd (as summarised in Barnett & Ceci, 2002) describes an experiment where kids throw darts at a target submerged under water. Half of the kids, in addition to practicing throwing darts, are taught about refraction of light in water. While all kids do equally well on the practice task, the kids that understand the physics do a lot better when the water depth was changed. Why?

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When the water depth changes, the target appears to be located in a different position than before. With shallower water, the target we see is a lot closer to the real location of the target. So kids that did not understand why they had to aim at a position off the target they saw to actually hit the target had a much harder time adjusting the way they aimed than those kids who actually understood what had changed.

But refraction is always cool to look at, even without throwing stuff. Here a picture from one of my very first blog posts (still in my house in Norway).

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“broken spoon”

Or from this blog post — a fountain in Sheffield:

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Or a swimming pool in Lüneburg that appears a lot shallower than it actually is (from this blog post).

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Or a table that gets completely deformed when seen through a glass of water (from this post).

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Refraction of light in water.

Is it only me or do other people sometimes also draw optical paths just for fun? ;-)

As frost starts melting, and the roof is getting dry, oh! The sun is up.

My office looks out directly onto the roof of our main lecture theatre, and it is fascinating how much you can observe just by looking out of a window and onto a roof.

Below is a picture of one of the first cold mornings we had this year. As the sun rose, more and more of the roof was lit and the frost melted away. Can you see where the shadow used to be just minutes ago from the shape of the still-frozen frost?

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Some time later, the first corner was completely dry, while other parts of the roof were still wet, the only-recently-lit parts of the roof still had frost n them, and some parts of the roof were still frosty in the shadows.

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I really enjoy making random observations that I bet most people wouldn’t even notice, but I take pictures of and write a haiku about. Good thing I have my blog :-)

Diffraction of light

Today I’m playing with the sun.

As I mentioned in the sun dog post already, I recently went on the ferry from Kiel to Gothenburg. And I had plenty of time to watch the sun rise and set.

One thing that kept me entertained for quite a while is to squeeze the sun through the imaginary eye in the mast:

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As the sun moved behind the mast (or as I moved in front of the mast, whatever), the sun seemed to get pinched in while passing.

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Watch the video below to see the whole thing in action:

Also highly entertaining: Watching how the sun eats into my finger tips as I bring them together in front of the sun:

Kids. If you try this at home, please make sure you only look at the sun on the display of your camera, never look directly into the sun…

Lighthouses and Fresnel lenses

Or more reasons for why I want to live in a lighthouse.

I have always been fascinated by lighthouses. Always. Usually because they are built in the most wonderful places and I would just love to live there. For example one near San Francisco that has this view:

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Golden Gate Bridge

But then also because they can cast their beams of light over such long distances, even though they look perfectly harmless during daytime:

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Close-up of the same lighthouse as above

So this is what the inside looks like (pictures taken at the ThinkTank science museum in Birmingham, UK):

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The insides of a lighthouse

And the whole thing is only lit by a tiny lightbulb!

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And there is just a tiny light bulb on the inside!

Watch the movie below to see how the light is focused by the Fresnel lenses. Really fascinated how the light bulb is surrounded only by glass, but still the light is focused really sharply.

I have a Fresnel lense that I’ll play around with soon, so stay tuned for more on cool optics! :-)

The broken spoon

Refraction of light in water.

I just happened to notice this the other day, so I thought I’d take a picture and share it with you.

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“broken spoon”

It is amazing how much more aware of everyday things that can be used to illustrate concepts related to oceanography I have become since starting this blog! This is so much fun! :-)