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Why is it that sound travels faster thru water than thru air?
We figure it's because the conducting molecules are closer together - more dense - and therefore are more conducive as a mechanical medium of chain reactive conduction.
*What of the fact that light slows down when it passes through a 'solid' conducting medium, such as water, or a crystal or glass prism, and then, after having passed through such medium, reclaims the speed it had before it was slowed down as it passed through the - whatever - solid, transparent medium?
Just what (why/how/when/where) is 'refraction', anyway?
Although the electromagnetic spectrum is, say, a foot wide, why is it that we can only see about an inch of that band width of frequencies?
Never mind the limitations of our sensory perception of sight. What is really going on here when refraction that we can see, divides light passing through a conducting medium - be it a rainbow generated mist of collective water droplets or a notably triangular shaped, exemplary prism: that is actually a tetrahedron - a pyramid shaped, transparent solid mass...
Often thought of as *'having four sides', when the bottom of the pyramid is left out of the equation, which is *incorrect, until we acknowledge the bottom plane of the pyramid, which gives it five individually considered planes, forming a triangular shape effected by an orthogonal structure in three dimensions which are actually four (Einstein), which conduct - while slowing down - projection of the fifth and sixth dimensions - of electricity & magnetism - through it; resulting in a 'refraction' of the transient light, constituting its division in to 'the seven - visible - colors of the solar spectrum'.
When combined as light (not opaque coloring substances) originate in the colorless white light, refracted to seven colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGBIV), re-engaging the speed it lost as it passed through the conducting medium.
Might it be comparable to the so called 'curvature of space' so often if wearisomely employed as an unrewarding description of the 4-D space-time continuum (associated with matter)?
Is the conducting - refracting - medium 4-dimensionally expanding?
Resulting in the fact that, between the time the frontal of a given beam of light enters the conducting medium, that medium continues to 4-dimensionally expand, as the fifth and sixth dimensions (of EM) pass through it, resulting in the apparent 'refraction' - displacement - of the 'geometrically straight' light beam, due to the fact that the point of exit isn't where a 'straight line' would actually exit, if the conducting medium (prism) was not 4-dimensionally expanding, ever faster, as the light beam passes through it?
Does the fact that, from the moment of the entry of a frontal of light into a conducting medium, that conducting medium has enlarged from the size it was at the space-time moment of entry - in the interim of transmission - to the space-time moment of exit?
Is 'refraction' a form of 'geodesic'?
Is the apparent division of the incoming, primary white light into the seven basic - solar spectral - colors, and the apparent shift from a straight line into seven individual course changes - refraction, actually a straight line 'geodesic', after all?
A so-called - in this case non parabolic - 'curvature of space-time'?
Due to the non-recogniton of what the 4-D space time continuum keeps proving itself to be (the unrecognized over-all 4-D enlargement of the conducting prism or rain-drop, around what is actually an unaltered, unshifted beam of straight line traveling light)?
Until further authenticated notice, I don't think the questions being asked here, have ever been asked - in this context - before: especially, with the accompanying potential - if partial - answers.
In the mix, is the fact that 'refraction' doesn't happen when light passes through a transparent conducting medium, the surface planes of which are parallel, such as in a flat planed pane of plate glass. Meaning, we're dealing with a model of a completely horizontal beam of light striking a completely vertical conducting medium, passing through it, without being refracted; whereas:
when that same horizontally traveling beam of light strikes and enters the angled plane of, say, a prism (or a large or tiny drop or sphere of water), on it's way through and before and as it exits, it is refracted - divided into seven colors (ROYGBIV), in that order:
suggesting in this consistently patterned exit, that the different lengths (all having the same value - Planck's constant h) of the correspondingly different colors are (or appear to be) somehow differently conducted and corroborately transformed (shifted, diverted from their straight line course), while slowing down in the conducting medium, and then, somehow - as previously noted - re-acquiring their entrance speed, upon exit.
This is a phenomenon worthy of contemplation and interpretatation.
(Note: the exit - in the case of a prism or a sphere - occurs at the converse angle of the angle of the conducting medium at the moment of the light beam's entrance...)
What is the character of this (conductive and/or transient) substance?
01-31-2008 07:52 PM 
