4 ms·
Humans Glow
- ars 17y agoI doubt it. The eye is able to see a single photon. So if humans glowed at all, people should be able to see it.
- jpeterson 17y ago[citation needed]
- tel 17y agoYour eyes have cells which contain pigments which react upon exposure to single photons. Single photon signal is really, really noisy though and so your eye requires thousands of such signals to combine in spatially and temporally relevant patterns before it sends a signal to your brain.
- davi 17y ago9 photons for 60% success rate of conscious perception http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...
- tel 17y agoHah, cool finding. I was considering a situation more similar to "detecting one further photon of light from an already illuminated scene": just-noticeable difference instead of absolute threshold.
- jsonscripter 17y agoBack in high school we calculated the energy in a single photon by turning down the power on an LED until it almost went out. We recorded the amount of power, and figured out the energy in a photon within 15% accuracy. I had a crazy Physics teacher :)
- eznet 17y agoAOL load this page slowly for anyone else? Direct: http://www.livescience.com/health/090722-body-glow.html http://www.livescience.com/health/090722-body-glow.html
- rue 17y agoAOL!
- anigbrowl 17y agoI posted this yesterday with the title 'it turns out people glow in the dark'. Then, as now, I objected to the headline, which should have said that humans glow in the visible light spectrum. One could hardly tell this in a lit environment, could one? [/pedant]
- rajat 17y agoSo all the aura readers were right after all?
- pygy 17y agoThe perception of auras is a kind of synesthesia (emotions => vision). It can also be related to optical illusions (like contrast amplification). Spontaneous synesthetic aura perception is very rare, and I don't know if you can develop it later on, or if secondary "aura readers" percieve the second kind, or if a strong emotion can trigger the phenomenon is someone who usually doesn't percieve it. There's nothing magical related to that.
- pmichaud 17y agoOh, I don't know... magic isn't about the supernatural, magic is about finding wonder in the mundane. This might qualify as magical.
- onreact-com 17y agoI bet the military loves that.
- tlrobinson 17y agoInfrared is a bigger problem.
- Mz 17y agoI've always kind of figured that the halos around holy figures had to be rooted in something real. Older cultures weren't so big on fictionalizing things. They generally drew or wrote about something real. Maybe they didn't understand it well and made up some myth to explain what it seemed like to them, the way Native Americans (of the northwest) had the idea that the world was a piece of land floating in a bowl of water and an earthquake was when one of the gods pushing down on one end of the land, causing it to dip under the water. This is a fairly accurate representation of the tsunamis that occur after coastal earthquakes. It makes sense from that perspective as an attempt to make a logical model of observed events in the face of incomplete information. We talk about a bride "glowing" on her wedding day. Perhaps that is not merely hyperbole. Perhaps it is something subtly perceived. And perhaps halos are also something subtly perceived. Saying that makes me think of expressions like "bringer of light" or "a light upon the world".