Monday Bites: Marooned

 Marooned: Hydrogen Discharge Lamp. 

Credit: UCL Mathematical and Physical Sciences from London, UK.
Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.  

                

What you see is Hydrogen gas. Marooned (*sorry for the pun) — magenta, I mean, inside what's called a Discharge Tube or a Discharge Lamp. If you put hydrogen gas inside such a tube and excite it, i.e., impart energy to it under a sufficiently strong electrical field (potential difference if you know better), you can strip away an electron from the individual atoms. Electrons, if you remember from your science lectures in high school, reside inside atoms in concentric shells or rings or stairs (only to help you draw a mental picture for they don't actually stay like that; electrons are fuzzy waves!). If an electron wants to climb a stair, it requires some energy. When you apply a strong electric field, electrons can climb up. On supplying more energy, you draw away the electrons from the atoms, leaving them ionized (positively charged). An ionized atom means it is in want of electrons. But the thing is, ionized atoms do not like to stay ionized. Why? It's complicated simple. I mean to say, it's the most beautiful aspect of Nature. Ionized atoms spontaneously gain electrons and return to their prior (neural) state. When an atom gains an electron, or say, when an electron climbs a stair back down, it releases the energy it formerly gained for climbing up. This energy exits the atom in the form of light — visible light that hits the rod and cone cells at the back of our retina and gives us the sensation of sight and color. You can put any element (from the periodic table) inside a discharge tube and get their characteristic colors. 

If you look through a diffraction grating — it functions like a prism but in a different way — you'll see that the magenta splits into four sharp lines — deep violet, then Prussian blue, followed by cyan, ending with a brilliant line of red. Here's what I'm talking about. 

Credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.  

In essence, you're looking at the Balmer series, after Johann Balmer, the physicist who predicted their existence. If you wonder what to do with this, let me tell you something. This is your key to a different reality. 

Pretty cool, huh?