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People Emit Visible Light
An Anonymous Reader writes "The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Japanese researchers have shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."
So, since this light is directly related to biological processes, that means in theory it should be tied to mood. For instance, clinical depression is tied to a general depression of all physiological processes. So, it would stand to reason that if you're down, you would emit less light. Someone who is euphoric should look (relatively) like a lightbulb in comparison. I know in the article it says that the amount and color of light varies, I wonder if this would lead towards a mood-ring style ability to read emotions. For instance, someone who is emitting a "pensive" light spectrum, along with other biological cues like sweat, and fidgiting may be a good suspect for scrutiny.
I'm not sure halos are even part of Christian canon.
it's entirely possible that extremely sensitive individuals can see the light coming off the extremely bright individuals.
If there are people who have vision that is 1,000 times normal, then they must get blinded by the sun really easily...
There may be something to metabolism ... which could easily generate 10 or 100 x the intensity observed in this study, and thus be observable by many people.
Conversely, the 'brights' (don't tell Dawkins about this!) would be producing lots more free-radicals than normal. I sure hope they also have more efficient repair mechanisms in place to mop them up.
Wait. You're telling me that the majority of people will use definition 1a, and only 1a, without even considering 1b, even though 1b specifically and directly refers to the exact phrase being used -- "visible light"?
You're telling me that the majority of English speaking people do not ever consider the multiple definitions that nearly every word in our language has, and choose based on contextual clues what the most likely intended meaning is? I don't buy that for a second. You know why? Because just now, without even thinking about it, you automatically processed the word "buy" and based on the contextual clues chose meaning number 5.
This has nothing to do with people choosing the first definition from a dictionary as opposed to the second, because nobody was looking in a dictionary. This has to do with people not knowing a scientific term so common and non-obscure it's definition 1b in said dictionary.
Okay, once again I'm surprised, and again I admit it must just be the fault of my perception.
I would never have guessed that people who have no idea what "visible light" means would find the phrase "light in the visible spectrum", or even just "spectrum" meaningful. I wouldn't have thought those people even knew that the stuff outside the visible spectrum was light. So you're telling me that people know that the colors in a rainbow and X-rays and radio waves are all the same thing, they're all light, but at the same time have no idea what "visible light" could mean? I really never would have expected that.
I guess this illustrates one of the difficulties of writing about technical material for a layman audience -- remembering what it was like to be a layman, and thus what a layman would understand, when that could have been a long time ago. As far as I can remember, I learned about the EM radiation spectrum that includes X-rays, radio waves, infrared, and the light our eyes are sensitive to along with the phrase "visible light" to describe the latter section of the spectrum in a single class session in high school physics. So it would never have occurred to me that you could expect your audience to know one and not the other.
The enemies of Democracy are
No, what I'm saying is that the proposition, "People Emit Visible Light", is a crock. I take words seriously. When they say "visible", I take it to mean "VISIBLE". If they meant to say, "people emit light in the visible part of the spectrum", then they should have said exactly that. Words have meanings.