Small observation about the size of light

in #science5 years ago

Someone was asking on a comment thread:

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After seeing that question, I made an interesting observation just making approximate numbers. Not 100% accurate, but kind of cool to think about.

Smaller, but not deadlier.

Violet light is around 450 nm, 1.77165e-5 inches. 1 square inch contains 60,000 melanocytes (skin cells), so there is around 1 skin cell per 1.66666667e-5 square inches. This is very approximate from some numbers on Wikipedia and a few seconds of my time, but you can see how violet light's wavelength is still larger than our approximate size of the skin cell, let alone small enough to do damage inside of the skin cell.

Wikipedia links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin

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