Dennis Whyte
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It's an interesting question, right?
Like, why can bees see in the ultraviolet and we can't?
Then you go, well, it's natural selection.
For some reason, this wasn't really particularly important to us, right?
Why can't we see in the infrared and other things can?
It's like, hmm, hmm.
It's a fascinating question, right?
Whatever you say, there's a cultural concern or that when people hear the word radiation, like what does this mean?
It literally just means light is what it means, right?
But it's light in different parts of the spectrum, right?
And so it turns out besides the visible light that we can see here, we are immersed in
in almost the totality of the electromagnetic spectrum.
There is visible light, there's infrared light, there is microwaves going around, as that's how our cell phone works.
It's way past our detection capability.
But also higher energy ones, which have to do with ultraviolet light, how you get a sunburn.
And even x-rays and things like this at small levels are continually being, like from the concrete in the walls of this hotel, there's x-rays hitting our body continuously.
We can go down to the lab at MIT and bring out a detector and show you.
Every single room will have x-rays.
Yeah, the 10 to the 28 atoms, and they're coming in and they're interacting with those things.
And those, particularly the ones where the light is at higher average energy per light particle, those are the ones that can possibly have an effect on human health.