Discovery of infrared rays | Hacker News Reader

Discovery of infrared rays

mesonstars.com

20 pointsabecedarius10 comments

> [T]hey behaved like visible light, yet they were not detected by the human eye.

The early days of discovering things that were real, but not human-perceptible, must have seemed almost magical.

We're used to it now, but initially it must have been mind-bending.

It could be the opposite. Researchers could be less cynical / skeptical back then about things that are real but can't be seen.

When the consensus was wrong they often didn't readily accept the correct interpretation. Miasma theory persisted into the 20th century for example.

It's kind of a shame it didn't stick around, since it is closer to the real dynamics of COVID-19 (and flu, probably) than the droplet dogma that replaced it. It turns out there really are invisible floating clouds around that can get you sick.

Do you have some articles to read about this? About covid and “floating clouds”? I thought the consensus still was on “droplets”.

The consensus was that there was a sharp cutoff between large particles (fall out of the air, transmit virus) and small ones (float around but doesn't transmit). It turns out this is not really based on anything other than tradition.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2021.004...

Maybe the belief that everything must be human perceptible was the real breakthrough. “Fruit flies occur naturally from miasma” sounds simple enough.

Put a few beers into your system and the Higgs field sounds an awful lot like The Aether.

Hell, even a page trying to debunk Higgs=ether muddies the water:

> If the already small mass of electrons was zero, as it would be without a Higgs field, then everything would just disintegrate

So no Higgs field, and electromagnetism (one of the things the Aether supposedly carried) stops working. Distinct, but not disconnected.

That is a really nice painting, uncredited, by Ken Hodges (1926-2011).

does the sun emit emf particularly strongly in the infrared band? or is the infrared band particularly good at heating our stuff on earth?

Because, there's energy across the spectrum of the refracted prism light, so why does the invisible emf do the most heating of what it strikes?

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