phetsims / blackbody-spectrum

"Blackbody Spectrum" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
GNU General Public License v3.0
1 stars 3 forks source link

User suggestion: wavelength and frequency units toggle #119

Open oliver-phet opened 4 years ago

oliver-phet commented 4 years ago

Blackbody curves graphed in wavelength units like this one are very misleading. For example, this makes it look like the sun emits most of its energy in the visible part of the spectrum, when, in fact, more of the sun's energy is emitted in the infrared than in the visible. The way to see this is to have an option to switch the graph to frequency units. Then the user could properly see where most of the energy is emitted. Please consider a toggle switch to change between wavelength and frequency units. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien%27s_displacement_law#Maxima_differ_according_to_parameterization

In frequency units, the sun's blackbody curve will have a peak around 850 nm, which more realistically shows how the sun's radiated energy is actually more in the infrared compared to what the wavelength-based graph shows.