Watching TV

This is a picture of two of my friends and me watching a movie. This long weekend gave me the opportunity to fry my brain in front of the television. It was wonderful. On Friday I watched Slumdog Millionaire and yesterday I watched The Patriot. They are both SUPER good movies :) It seems that just like everything else in our everyday lives, there is quite a bit of physics involved in watching tv. I will now attempt to give a rudimentary explanation of these physics concepts. Hopefully by the end of the year, I will have a much more comprehensive understanding of these concepts.

First of all there is the light and images that you see on the tv. Visible light is a type of electromagnetic radiation that we learned about in chemistry last year. The different frequencies of the light waves result in us seeing different colors. There is also the sound that we hear coming out of the tv. Sound also travels in waves and the different frequencies of sound waves result in us hearing different pitches. The amplitude of the wave determines the volume.

Brightness is also a factor in watching tv. In biology, we learned that our eyes contain two types of photo sensitive receptors: Cone shaped and rod shaped. The rod shaped receptors make you aware of changes in brightness whereas the cone shaped receptors make you see colors. There are many more rod shaped receptors in your eye than cone shaped receptors, so our eyes are much more sensitive to brightness than color. There is much more physics involved with the eyeball itself and how exactly we see, but we haven's learned about it yet. Maybe I'll write another blog about watching tv at the end of the year after we have learned about all of this in depth, and then I can feel really smart after I compare it to this blog entry :)