Optics/Light

[AnObserver]

I've been playing around with my acquired understanding of light because I'm very interested in this notion of a concurrent causation effect. That is to say how photons are absorbed in the form of radiant energy from other bodies onto our own and then emitted off of our bodies not only from that absorbed radiant energy but from our own intrinsic chemical metabolic processes in the form of infrared waves and other spectra. It seems very disorienting. How does one figure out what did what to the what? Is my understanding somewhat accurate of what has been experimentally determined? Is there a way to extrapolate the origin of all this mess? Were probability dealing with statistics I'm assuming? I'm gonna revisit the current understanding of optics. Does quantum mechanics make some sense of this mess?

[Lincoln]

I don't understand that entirely, but we certainly have measured incident spectrum and emitted spectrum of many things. Some of the emitted spectrum is reflected, while some is absorbed and re-emitted.

The absorption and emission processes are well understood, as is the reflection process.

[henriette]

Dear AnObserver, you may surely refer to so-called non-linear optics. Indeed, as you mention it, the optical transfert functions of some material are not proportional to the incident light. You may know the green (wavelength = 0.532µm) and the red laser (wavelength = 1.016µm) pointers, the green is derived from the red from a non-linear material that double frequencies. Yes also, you need some basics of quantic mechanics to write the equations. The result is comparable to parametric amplification in electronics. While this is a second order effect, the refraction, as well as the birefringence, is explained in the first order, linear, of the response of the material that is the domain of geometrical optics.