LMR-047 · Light
Infrared
Your skin can see infrared. Your eyes just can't.
§ A first look
§ Depths
Six ways into the same idea — from bedtime story to chalkboard. No order required.
L1 · Crayon
Told like a bedtime story.
For a curious 10-year-old. No jargon. Just a picture in your head.
Hold your hand close to a mug of hot cocoa without touching it. You can feel the warmth coming off it. That warmth is actually a kind of light — but the wrong colour for your eyes to see, so you only feel it. This invisible warmth-light is called infrared. Everything warm gives it off, including you. Special cameras can 'see' it and turn it into pictures, which is how we spot a person in a totally dark room. Or a missing pet behind the couch. Or every tiny heat leak in your apartment, if you want to be miserable.
§ Strange but true
- 01Heat is light you can't see. Every warm thing — including you — is glowing right now.
- 02JWST sees in infrared because the early universe's light has been stretched into it by expansion.
- 03Snakes see in infrared. They literally watch you cool.
§ From the field journal
Infrared
"Your skin can see infrared. Your eyes just can't."
— observed, sketched, not yet fully understood.
§ Nearby