Infrared Quotes

I am not a climatologist, but I don't think any of the other witnesses are either. I do work in the related field of atomic, molecular and optical physics. I have spent my professional life studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases - one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect. I have published over 200 papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. ~ William Happer

When cars have the sensory systems around them, GPS intelligence, they're looking at the world not only in visual spectrum, but infrared, ultraviolet and everything else that's going on and they've got reaction times in microseconds. Not a tenth of a second. They're a hundred thousand times faster. ~ Peter Diamandis

I've been wanting to tell people my theory about what goes on after time. It's beyond our consciousness. We get glimpses of it between the infrared and the ultraviolet - the narrow narrow corridor of light that we are able to perceive. ~ Russell Brand

Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location.
The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the ~ Carl Sagan

Amy is blatantly fond of red light bulbs instead of, you know, normal ones, and I can't see shit. Silly me, running out without my infrared night vision goggles and all. ~ S.E. Hall

The past has a future, something it becomes, and that transforms it. Like the facts themselves, the person, the "I", who experiences it and looks back on it discovers that it is not singular, but plural. Traveling through those places marked down in those epic chronicles of thirty years ago, one gets the impression of slicing through paper-thin, invisible barriers, different levels of reality, still present and with us even though not discernible to the naked eye, infrared or ultraviolet rays of history, images and instants that at this point cannot print an image on the celluloid, but which nonetheless are, and exist in the same way for tangible experience as electrons which elude our grasp. ~ Claudio Magris

Brummer was unique. His world was known as a haven for those who still refused to embrace technology. Like most Dragolians, he was similar to the original template of a human being. For ages, Dragolians had refused the implementation of advanced genes within their population. Whereas most humans had infrared, telescopic, and fractional vision that permitted them to observe and scrutinize four or five different things at once at various depths, Dragolians did not. While most humans could survive with their gills under oceans or with their skin sealant secretion in the vacuum of space and hostilities of planet atmospheres, Dragolians couldn't. They lacked double genitals, temperature control genes and other basic comforts that were standards on any individual. They still possessed the original brain schematic, refusing to compartmentalize areas to specific functions with enhanced nerve terminals. It had been proven long ago that a triple brain split into small sectors connected with each other was the most functional intellectual state. One part was mainly used for the conscious state, one for the virtual state, and the other as the control center of the body's physiology while also doubling as the backup copy of the essential traits of the other two parts. This third part of the brain also was the input/output terminal that interacted between the two other minds and the cyber world. Even so, this was all likely to change in a few years as research was on the verge of eliminati ~ Vincent Pet

Just as the spectrums of light and sound are far broader than what we humans can see and hear, so the spectrum of mental states is far larger than what the average human perceives. We can see light in wavelengths of between 400 and 700 nanometres only. Above this small principality of human vision extend the unseen but vast realms of infrared, microwaves and radio waves, and below it lie the dark dominions of ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Similarly, the spectrum of possible mental states may be infinite, but science has studied only two tiny sections of it: the sub-normative and the WEIRD. For ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We thing we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead. ~ Damon Knight

In the late 1960s, red and the low green LEDs and the infrared semiconductor lasers had already been developed, but there was no prospect of practical blue light emitters, even in the '70s. ~ Isamu Akasaki

WorldView-3 goes into the mid-infrared wavelength, allowing you to see very subtle geological differences on the sites at a 0.4-metre resolution. ~ Sarah Parcak

The entire electromagnetic spectrum - from radar to TV, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays - is nothing but Maxwell waves, which in turn are vibrating Faraday force fields. ~ Michio Kaku

Everything we think we know is really only perceived by our senses,' he explains patiently. 'The sounds we hear are just waves in the air; colors are electromagnetic radiation; your sense of taste comes from molecules that match a specific area on your tongue. Hey, if our eyes could access the infrared part of the light spectrum, the sky would be green and trees would be red. Some animals see in completely different ways, so who knows what colors look like to them. Nothing is really how we perceive it. ~ Wendy Mass

We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach's help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd. ~ Judith Curry

Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement - waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house. ~ Anthony Doerr

The bottom line is that finding orphan planets - small, faint, and located who-knows-where - is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few. ~ Seth Shostak

All bodies are radiant but not all radiance is visible: stars radiate visible light; planets and donkeys and couches radiate infrared waves. (If your couch is emitting visible light GET UP IMMEDIATELY!) ~ Amy Leach

Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brian: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. ~ Annie Dillard

Vanity is by far my favorite of all sins, and the camera lens is the ultimate vanity mirror. The camera captures all moods and nuances; immortalizes the soft and silky continuum that is humanity. Those still life moments seem so fluid, so representative of continuity. They are a single moment captured, yet an eternity expressed. All your youth; all your ages, captured and expressed in a single click.

Of all the indulgences, vanity is certainly my favorite which we should otherwise resist, but are inexplicably captivated by and addicted. What other animal would spend so much time pouting and preening for its reflection? Only humanity would participate in such self-adoration.

You would think we have the most colorful feathers or softest of manes. Rather, we are a naked biped that feels incomplete without some decorative element, accessory, or embellishment of the self. We are intoxicated by the image of the body, no different than we are seduced by fine wines, foods, or mind altering elements. We devour the skin, and peel away clothes as if they were the skin of some tropical fruit, covering a colorful and juicy interior. We hunt for bodily pleasures, and collect them as prizes; show them off in social situations as if our companions were some sort of extended adornment to ourselves.

We are revealed in our sensuality. To touch beneath the surface; to connect beyond facades, that unattainable discourse between individuals is put tentatively wi ~ A.E. Samaan

Do you hear that?" he says.
"You mean the crashing thunder and pounding rain?"
He shakes his head. I listen closely, trying to filter o
ut the sounds of the storm.
Then I hear it. A whooshing sound with a fast buzzing underne
ath it. It's so, so familiar
but I can't quite put my finger on it. A very definite blac
k spot appears among the dark gray
clouds. The spot lengthens horizontally.
The puzzle pieces click into place and I get the full pictur
e: Fighter jet. Headed straight
for us. It could be a coincidence, right? F-22 Raptors fly
low through giant thunderstorms over
major metropolitan areas in the middle of the night a
ll the time. Right.
My illusions of a coincidence are shattered - by a mis
sile flying straight at me. It would
seem this guy has infrared, too. I mean, missiles? Really?
Isn't that a bit overkill? I start flying
away, but Sani stops me.
"Dive! ~ Sarah Nicolas

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing. ~ Alan Lightman

There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat and thus warm the Earth because they prevent a significant proportion of infrared radiation from escaping into space. ~ George W. Bush

The Next Generation Space Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore the infrared part of the spectrum. ~ Claude Nicollier

Do you have infrared vision?" Interest glittered on his face.

Venom smiled, the curious reaction a far preferable one to quivering fear or horror. "You'll have to court me with roses and diamonds before asking such intimate questions."

Vivek snorted. "It's just like working for the Guild--place is full of smartasses. ~ Nalini Singh

We found that bone was an LED. Like many such materials, it required an outside source of light before an electric current would make it release its own light, and the light it emitted was at an infrared frequency invisible to us, but the effect was consistent and undeniable. ~ Robert O. Becker

As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous.

Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control.

--Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist) ~ Lee Strobel

A team from Sydney, Australia, has lowered levels of these proteins using light. They implanted human genes associated with Alzheimer's into mouse DNA, so that the animals developed abnormal tau proteins and amyloid plaques. Then they treated them for a month with low-level light therapy, simply by holding the light one to two centimeters above the animals' heads. Using the same spectrum of near-infrared light that has helped in traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's disease, and retinal damage, they lowered both the pathological tau proteins and the amyloid plaques by 70 percent in key brain areas that Alzheimer's affects. Thereafter signs of "rusting" decreased, and the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, improved their function. ~ Norman Doidge

I sit in an infrared sauna everyday and microwave myself. It's really detoxifying. ~ Scottie Thompson