this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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I thought that the frequency of light was directly inverse to the wavelength by a constant. In other words, I assumed that graphing the frequency of light as a function of wavelength would be a straight inverse line. Because of that, the graphs for the distribution of light from the sun as functions of frequency and wavelength would be exactly the same, but reversed. Yet, this is not what is reported in the linked article. Even more confusing to me is that the different functions peak at different light. When as a function of frequency, the light peaks at infrared. When as a function of wavelength, the light peaks at violet.

What am I misunderstanding? Is the frequency of light not directly proportional to it's wavelength? Or is this something to do with the way we are measuring the light from the Sun?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I think that answer is a touch misleading because it makes it sound like this is a fundamental physical limit, when really it's just the scale where our current theories break down and give nonsense results, so we don't really know what is going on at that scale yet.