William Herschel

We begin by discussing some of the more familiar kinds of radiation, such as radio and microwaves, light and x-rays.

lasers by hal hellman the electromagnetic spectrum some eighty-five per cent of what man learns comes to him through his vision in response to the medium of light yet ironically it was until the end of the seventeenth century that he first began to get an inkling of what light really is it took the great scientific genius isaac newton to show that so-called white light is really a combination of all the colors of the rainbow a few years later the dutch astronomer christian huygens introduced the idea that light is a wave motion a concept finally validated in eighteen o three when the british physician thomas young ingeniously demonstrated interference effects in waves thus it was finally realized that the only difference between the various colors of light was one of wavelength for light was indeed found to be a wave phenomenon no different in principle from the water waves you have seen a thousand times if you stand at the seashore you can easily count the number of waves that approach the shore in a minute divide that number by sixty and you have the frequency of the wave motion in the familiar unit cycles per second sometimes referred to as hertz abbreviated hz for the nineteenth century german physicist heinrich hertz one thousand hertz equal one thousand cycles per second and footnote you would have to count pretty quickly to do this for light however light waves vibrate or oscillate at the rate of some four hundred million million times a second That's the vibration rate of waves of red light.

Violet light results in vibrations that are just about twice that fast.

With frequencies of this magnitude, discussion and handling of data and dimensions are cumbersome and rather awkward.

Named for the Swedish physicist Anders J. Angstrom.

End footnote.

which is equal to one hundred millionth part of a centimeter thus we find that the visible light range runs from the violet at about four thousand angstroms to red at about seven thousand angstroms at roughly the same time that the wavelength of light was being determined the german-british astronomer william herschel performed an interesting experiment He held a thermometer in turn in the various colors of light that had been spread out by an optical prism.

As he moved the thermometer from the violet to the red, the temperature reading rose, and it continued to rise as he moved the instrument beyond the red area, where no prismatic light could be seen.

right.

Thinkers like William Herschel had mapped the deep sky.

People were looking through increasingly powerful telescopes and realizing for the first time the sheer incomprehensible scale of the universe.

You're

Oh, yeah.

And I found William Herschel proposed the term, and he didn't know what to call them initially.

He asked.

someone a greek specialist he wanted a good name for the new bodies reached out to a close friend who wrote his son who was a greek scholar ross you would appreciate this and um the father had said what about stellula and i love this then the son didn't didn't only goes okay he just came up with asteroids it's a kind of star which my son furnished but he didn't like the name he just like chucked it in at the last minute because he had to come up with something and stellula didn't really do it for

He was also prominent in astronomy, naming the seven moons of Saturn and the four moons of Uranus.

Ironically, the planet Uranus had in fact been discovered by his father, Sir William Herschel, in 1781.

Moving on to the present day, this week on YBA, we kick things off with the reviews wrap-up for the week ending the 4th September 2026, where a broker's decision to revisit 51 loans provides a pretty compelling example of why consistency matters.

Then we move into our hump day helper, where I share the official notice of Suncorp's disappearance, confirming the rumour from earlier this year.