Last week I had the honor and privilege of giving a talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Afterwards I even got to tour the National Ignition Facility (which I hope to be able to write more about, if they get some “approved” photos to me). And to top it all off, they gave me a lovely bag of parting gifts.
One of those gifts is a full-sized poster of the above image: “Chart of Electromagnetic Radiations.” The story behind it is that someone found the original poster on the wall of a long-unused office somewhere on the site, and people thought it was so cool, they scanned it and had copies made. This is where the cool part comes in — they’ve put the full-sized scan file on the Lab’s Flickr site, so if you know any science geeks in your life, you can just download the file and print/plot it yourself!
And, for historical coolness, note that the poster says it was “Edited by Arthur H. Compton.” That’s Arthur Holly Compton, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the Compton Effect, that helps explain the dual nature of light as a wave and a particle (he was also a huge part of the Manhattan Project).
Download the original poster here.
Look closely in the TIME section (middle bottom) and it refers to:
9.5 x 10^17 sec = 1 light year
According to Google: 1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10^17 centimeters.
The Flickr links are broken – any chance for an updated link