Today we had a Professor come to our class to teach us about light and shadows. He had a lot of cool things that he brought – they all had to do with light. One machine had a prism that bends the light and shows all the colors of the spectrum. He brought a spark maker. Bzzzz. It sounded like a huge swarm of bees. It made the tubes of the Spectrotubes glow, and showed us that you can identify different gases and chemicals because of the color of light they will give off.


We learned that light gives off heat. I didn’t know that stars can be hotter than the sun. There is also invisible light. Ultraviolet light is hotter than infra red. Did you know there are two types of heat, because there is ultraviolet which is really hot (you can get a sunburn) and infra red is just hot. When you look at certain kinds of light you can burn your eyes. Did you know that the border of a postage stamp glows under ultraviolet light? That’s how the post office checks it is real.

We also learned light is so fast it can travel 1000 miles in a fraction of a second, and can go around the world. Wow – that’s fast! A red laser pointer would shine farther than a green one would because of the length of the color waves. Professor Weichmann is hilarious too. He made a stove for the poor people who didn’t have it. He told us about some of the things we could learn and do if we take Physics in University.