3 ms·
I would have explained it by the irregularities at the surface of windowpanes. Huh, is it what is said in a more mathematical way in the link?
by y04nn 8y ago
I would have explained it by the irregularities at the surface of windowpanes. Huh, is it what is said in a more mathematical way in the link?
- xevb3k 8y agoNo, my understanding of the page is as follows. If d (width of the window) is large. Small changes in the wavelength create large differences in phase. So if you have say light in the range 400 to 401nm coming through the window. There are peaks and troughs in that range, but overall there is no effect. Light sources are like that in general, they’re not 450.00001nm but some Gaussian distribution around a point. And within that Gaussian there are peaks and troughs but they cancel out. That was my understanding anyway...
- moopling 8y agoActually the authors point would stand even for a perfectly smooth window pane. The point is that as the thickness increases the length scale over which light goes from constructive to destructive interference reduces, and as this happens you end up sampling more and more uniformly colours from a uniform spectrum. At some point our eye can no longer tell that we are only seeing n monochromatic wavelengths of light. Okay not monochromatic, but very narrow bandwidth peaks