Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Infrared, and How It Was Found

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Infrared, and How It Was Found

Infrared is radiation beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, and its discovery in 1800 is the moment the idea of light stopped being coextensive with the idea of colour.

William Herschel was looking for a practical answer to a practical problem: which coloured filter would let him observe the sun without burning his eye. He passed sunlight through a prism and moved a thermometer along the spectrum to see which colours carried the most heat. The reading rose from violet toward red, and then, when he moved the bulb past red into what appeared to be nothing at all, it rose further still. He had measured radiation outside the visible band, and he called it radiant heat.

The consequence for colour symbolism is the same as for ultraviolet at the other end, and it should be stated as plainly. Infrared has no traditional correspondences because no tradition could perceive it. Any scheme that assigns it a planet, a chakra or a virtue is a modern construction extending an older system into territory that system never covered, and the atlas records it as such.

What infrared does have is a substantial modern life. Thermal imaging reveals heat rather than light, and it is used in astronomy to see through the dust that blocks visible wavelengths, so a good deal of what is now known about star formation was obtained in a band nobody can look at. Some snakes detect infrared through pit organs, which is a form of sight that has nothing to do with eyes.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.