When Thinking About Electromagnetic Waves, Think Chains

You know the “beaded chain fountain” experiment? Well, here’s a video about it and how it works:

Turns out that unique structure of the beaded chain causes the each link to push off the bottom of the beaker just before it takes off feeding extra force up the chain to make it leap out. The same effect in reverse happens when each link hits the floor: it tags down on the chain with a tiny whiplash-like effect.

When Max Planck was trying to understand electromagnetism in the 1890s and 1900s, he though of the radiation coming from every atom as a chain of tiny beads. Each link in the chain pulled on those around it producing radiation waves.

Read Hitting the Books: How Planck’s ‘chain of tiny beads’ helps explain why lightbulbs work for an explanation of how this model works.

This article ends in a question that they were still trying to solve in Max Planck’s time: what is the precise relationship between the temperature of an object and the frequencies of electromagnetic waves it produces?

Let’s do some research to answer this question. Anyone who comes up with a video or article with a good and correct answer will get 100 points (leave links). If you write a complete explanation on how they discovered the answer and how that works (at least 2 full paragraphs), you’ll get 400 points!

PS. I’m not sure how we’re going to use the physics of electromagnetism in the story yet, but we sure will!

Research Ideas?

Small Items: Post in the comments section.

Large Items: Create a post and link to in the comments section.

Suggested Keywords:

temperature, frequency, waves, electromagnetic, radiation

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Responses

  1. Heat transfer by thermal radiation is transfer of heat by electromagnetic waves. It is different from conduction and convection as it requires no matter or medium to be present. … Therefore the radiation mode of heat transfer dominates over convection at high temperature levels as in fires.

      1. Please restate this explanation in your own words like we’ve been working on. If you need to, let’s have a conversation about it while you type again. The link you provided seems like an interesting research site, but I didn’t see anything on the topic. Maybe you can show me what you found there.

    1. We did look at this. Interesting video about related topics. Remember in our conversation how I held a flashlight and said “Imagine the light coming out of it is like tooth paste. What happens if I vibrate the flashlight up and down?” You replied that the “tooth paste light” would make a wave. I said that temperature is a measure of how much a atom is vibrating with heat energy. The vibration of the atom makes a wave in the same frequency of its vibration. But we need to find a more scientific explanation for this. Try a search for “temperature and frequency” on Youtube.