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2 - 4 - Units of Light (3_16) 4/24/14, 7:18 PM

We're also going to talk a lot about light
in this class.
And so, you need to be familiar with the
various
ways of describing the different kinds of
light that are found.
A light ray consists of waves that
we'll talk more about in future
lectures.
But one way to characterize the different
kinds of
light waves is by the wavelength,
the distance between two adjacent peaks.
It's given the Greek letter lambda to
describe the wavelength.
And the units of wavelength are the number
of cycles per centimeter.
I have this upside down here.
No, centimeter, centimeters per cycle,
that's centimeters per cycle.
And a lot of times, the units of cycle are
left
out, sort of implicit.
And so sometimes very often you will
see wavelength described in units of
centimeters.
Another way to describe light is in terms
of the frequency of light.
So light is moving at some speed C, the
speed of light.
And so, if you're just sitting here
watching this light
go past you, you can count the peaks as
they're coming.
And so, the frequency of the light, which
is given
the Greek letter nu, has units of cycles
per second.
Or, since they tend to drop the cycles,
you can see this written as just
one over seconds, or seconds to the minus
1.
Can be confusing if you don't know what's
going on.
But it's not that hard.
So if we want to get some more factor
label
practice at converting units, this is a
good example.
Let's say we have a wavelength of light
and we want to calculate its frequency.
So the frequency has units of cycles per
second.
So that's what we want.
And looking at the wavelength,
the wavelength itself is centimeters per
cycle,
but it looks like we want the cycles to be
on top.
So I'm going to put the wavelength
upside-down, one over lambda.
And so that gives us units here of
cycles per centimeter, the inverse of
lambda there.
And then the speed of light C can be used
to cancel the centimeters and get us
the cycles per second that we're looking for.
Another metric
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2 - 4 - Units of Light (3_16) 4/24/14, 7:18 PM
of light that turns out to be useful
when we start talking about infrared light is
called the wave number.
And the wave number is simply the amount,
the number of waves within 1 centimeter of
distance.
So you count the number of peaks in there,
and the units of that are cycles per
centimeter.
Or by neglecting, ignoring the cycles
there, it's oftentimes written as
1 / cm, or cm raised to the
power of minus 1.
The wave number is just given the
regular letter n.