Yes, fluorescents are more energy efficient overall. To begin with, fluorescent lights have a much longer life than incandescent lights--the fluorescent tube lasts many thousands of hours and its fixture lasts tens of thousands of hours. So the small amount of energy spent building an incandescent bulb is deceptive--you have to build a lot of those bulbs to equal the value of one fluorescent system.

Second, although there is considerable energy consumed in manufacturing the complicated components of a fluorescent lamp, it's unlikely to more than a few kilowatt-hours--the equivalent of the extra energy a 100 watt incandescent light uses up in a week or so of typical operation. So it may take a week or two to recover the energy cost of building the fluorescent light, but after that the energy savings continue to accrue for years and years.

To track someone in a forest, he must be emitting or reflecting something toward you and doing it in a way that is different from his surroundings. For example, if he is talking in a quiet forest, you can track him by his sound emissions. Or if he is exposed to sunlight in green surroundings, you can track him by his reflections of light.

But while both of these techniques work fine at short distances, they aren't so good at large distances in a dense forest. A better scheme is to look for his thermal radiation. All objects emit thermal radiation to some extent and the spectral character of this thermal radiation depends principally on the temperatures of the objects. If the person is hotter than his surroundings, as is almost always the case, he will emit a different spectrum of thermal radiation than his surrounds. Light sensors that operate in the deep infrared can detect a person's thermal radiation and distinguish it from that of his cooler surroundings. Still, viewing that thermal radiation requires a direct line-of-sight from the person to the infrared sensor, so if the forest is too dense, the person is untrackable.

A halogen bulb uses a chemical trick to prolong the life of its filament. In a regular bulb, the filament slowly thins as tungsten atoms evaporate from the white-hot surface. These lost atoms are carried upward by the inert gases inside the bulb and gradually darken the bulb's upper surface. In a halogen bulb, the gases surrounding the filament are chemically active and don't just deposit the lost atoms at the top of the bulb. Instead, they react with those tungsten atoms to form volatile compounds. These compounds float around inside the bulb until they collide with the filament again. The extreme heat of the filament then breaks the compounds apart and the tungsten atoms stick to the filament.

This tungsten recycling process dramatically slows the filament's decay. Although the filament gradually develops thin spots that eventually cause it to fail, the filament can operate at a higher temperature and still last two or three times as long as the filament of a regular bulb. The hotter filament of a halogen bulb emits relatively more blue light and relatively less infrared light than a regular bulb, giving it a whiter appearance and making it more energy efficient.

An acetylene miner's lamp produces acetylene gas through the reaction of solid calcium carbide with water. An ingenious system allows the production of gas to self-regulate--the gas pressure normally keeps the water away from the calcium carbide so that gas is only generated when the lamp runs short on gas. In contrast, a propane lamp obtains its gas from pressurized liquid propane. Whenever the propane lamp runs short on gas, the falling gas pressure allows more liquid propane to evaporate.

Only the propane lamp needs a mantle to produce bright light. That's because the hot gas molecules that are produced by propane combustion aren't very good at radiating their thermal energy as visible light. The mantle extracts thermal energy from the passing gas molecules and becomes incandescent--it converts much of its thermal energy into thermal radiation, including visible light. Mantles are actually delicate ceramic structures consisting of metal oxides, including thorium oxide. Thorium is a naturally occurring radioactive element, similar to uranium, and lamp mantles are one of the few unregulated uses of thorium.

The light emitted by these oxide mantles is shorter in average wavelength than can be explained simply by the temperature of the burning gases, so it isn't just thermal radiation at the ambient temperature. The mantle's unexpected light emission is called candoluminescence and is thought to involve non-thermal light emitted as the result of chemical reactions and radiative transitions involving the burning gases and the mantle oxides.

In contrast, the acetylene miner's lamp works pretty well without a mantle. I think that's because the flame contains lots of tiny carbon particles that act as the mantle and emit an adequate spectrum of yellow thermal radiation. Many of these particles then go on to become soot. A candle flame emits yellow light in the same manner.

One last feature of a properly constructed miner's lamp, a safety lamp, is that it can't ignite gases around it even if those gases are present in explosive concentrations. That's because the lamp's flame is surrounded by a fine metal mesh. This mesh draws heat out of any gas within its holes and thus prevents the flame inside the mesh from igniting any gas outside the mesh.

The glass enclosures are made from a ribbon of hot glass that's first thickened and then blown into molds to form the bulb shapes. These enclosures are then cooled, cut from the ribbon, and their insides are coated with the diffusing material that gives the finished bulb its soft white appearance.

The filament is formed by drawing tungsten metal into a very fine wire. This wire, typically only 42 microns (0.0017 inches) in diameter is first wound into a coil and then this coil is itself wound into a coil. The mandrels used in these two coiling processes are trapped in the coils and must be dissolved away with acids after the filament has been annealed.

The finished filament is clamped or welded to the power leads, which have already been embedded in a glass supporting structure. This glass support is inserted into a bulb and the two glass parts are fused together. A tube in the glass support allows the manufacturer to pump the air out of the bulb and then reintroduce various inert gases. When virtually all of the oxygen has been eliminated from the bulb, the tube is cut off and the opening is sealed. Once the base of the bulb has been attached, the bulb is ready for use.

The thermal radiation that a person emits is mostly infrared light and, like all light, it can travel forever if nothing gets in its way. In principle, if you can observe something through a telescope, you can also measure its temperature. For example, astronomers can measure the temperature of a distant star by studying the star's spectrum of thermal radiation.

However, there are several complications when using this technique to measure a person's temperature. First, anything that lies between the person and you, and that absorbs or emit thermal radiation, will affect your measurement. That's because some of the thermal radiation that appears to be coming from the person may be coming from those in between things. Fortunately, air is moderately transparent to thermal radiation but many other things aren't. In fact, to get an accurate reading of person's temperature, you'd have to cool the telescope and the light detector so that they don't add their own thermal radiation to what you observe. You'd also have to use a mirror telescope because glass optics absorb infrared light.

Second, the temperature that you observe will be that of the person's skin and not their inner core temperature. That's because the person's skin absorbs any infrared light from inside the person and it emits its own infrared light to the world around the person. You can't observe infrared light from inside the person because the person's skin blocks your view. All you see is their skin temperature.

An ear thermometer examines the spectrum of thermal radiation emitted by the inner surfaces of a person's ear. All objects emit thermal electromagnetic radiation and that radiation is characteristic of their temperatures--the hotter an object is, the brighter its thermal radiation and the more that radiation shifts toward shorter wavelengths. The thermal radiation from a person's ear is in the invisible infrared portion of the light spectrum, which is why you can't see people glowing. But the ear thermometer can see this infrared light and it uses the light to determine the ear's temperature. The thermometer's thermal radiation sensor is very fast, which accounts for the speed of the measurement.

When you use a bulb designed for 130 volts in a fixture that operates at 120 volts, the bulb's filament runs at less than its rated temperature. This temperature change has two consequences--one good and one bad. The good news is that operating the filament at less than its normal temperature slows the evaporation of tungsten atoms and prolongs the filament's life. That's why your bulbs are lasting so long. The bad news is that incandescent bulbs become much less energy efficient as you lower their filament temperatures. The light emitted by the filament is thermal radiation and its color spectrum and brightness depend almost exclusively on its temperature. These 130-volt bulbs emit redder and dimmer light than a normal bulb and they are significantly less energy efficient as a result. Incandescent bulbs already emit far more invisible infrared light than visible light and operating them at reduced temperatures only makes this problem worse. I recently read the statement "this bulb burns cooler than a normal bulb" on a package of super-long-life bulbs--as though burning cooler was a good thing rather than a serious shortcoming.

As energy becomes more and more precious, making the most of it becomes more and more important. I would suggest saving these 130-volt bulbs for fixtures that are so difficult to reach that you want to avoid changing bulbs at all costs. In more easily accessible fixtures, replacing bulbs is only a minor inconvenience associated with improved energy efficiency. Better still, switch to fluorescent lamps--which are much more energy efficient than even the best incandescent lamps.

The hotter the fire, the more green and blue light it emits. The dimmest glow that you can see in a darkened room appears when a surface is about 400° C. The dull red of a heat lamp is about 500° C. A candle's yellow glow is about 1700° C. A normal incandescent lamp is about 2500° C. And the sun is about 5800° C. Blue fire would be hotter still, except it's usually colored artificially by the presence of excited atoms. Atomic emissions are colored because atoms can't emit all colors in order to produce a normal spectrum of thermal radiation. Instead, they preferentially emit only specific colors. That's why when you burn copper, you see blue-green light, even when the copper isn't very hot. The copper atoms just can't emit red or yellow light, even though those would be the more appropriate colors at the temperature of the burning copper.

There are many ways of producing infrared light. First, any warm surface emits infrared light. For example, a heat lamp or an electric space heater emits enormous amounts of it. That's because the thermal radiation of a warm object lies mostly in the invisible infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Second, many light-emitting electronic devices emit infrared light. For example, the light emitting diodes in a television remote control unit emit infrared light. In this case, the infrared light is emitted by electrons that are shifting from one group of quantum levels in a semiconductor to another group--from conduction levels to valence levels. This emission isn't thermal radiation; it doesn't involve heat.

Lastly, some infrared light is produced by lasers. In this case, excited atoms or atomic-like systems amplify passing infrared light to produce enormous numbers of identical light particles--identical photons. Infrared industrial lasers are commonly used to machine everything from greeting cards to steel plates.

A three-way touch lamp is much like a simple touch lamp--it detects your touch by applying a high frequency alternating charge to the lamp's surfaces and uses this fluctuating charge to measure the lamp's electric capacitance--the ease with which charge can moved on or off the lamp's surfaces. When you touch the lamp, the lamp's capacitance changes and the lamp's electronics detect this change.

In a three-way touch lamp, the lamp's electronics control 4 different light levels alternately: dim, medium, bright, and off. How these light levels are obtained depends on the lamp. If the lamp uses a three-way light bulb, which contains two separate filaments, then it can obtain the 3 brightness levels by turning on one or both of the filaments. It uses just the small filament for dim, just the large filament for medium, and both filaments for bright. That's exactly what a normal three-way lamp does.

But if the lamp uses a normal bulb and obtains three light levels from it, then it uses the same technique as a dimmer switch. In this technique, an electronic switching device called a triac is used to limit the times during which electric current can flow through the bulb and deliver power to it. In the bright setting, the triac permits current to flow through the bulb at all times and the bulb appears as bright as possible. But in the dim or medium settings, the triac prevents current from flowing at certain times. The triac takes advantage of the fact that the power flowing through a household lamp is alternating current--current that reverses directions 120 times a second (in the United States) for a total of 60 full cycles of reversal, over and back, each second (60 Hz). At the beginning of each current reversal, the electronic devices that control the triac start a timer. This timer allows those devices to wait a certain amount of time before they trigger the triac and allow it to begin carrying current to the light bulb. Once triggered, the triac will allow current to flow through the bulb until the next reversal of current in the power line. Thus the amount of energy that reaches the bulb during each half-cycle of the power line depends on how long the electronic devices wait before triggering the triac. The longer they wait, the less energy will reach the bulb and the dimmer it will glow. In the bright setting, the triac is triggered immediately after each current reversal so that power always flows to the bulb and it glows brightly. But in the medium and dim settings, the triac is triggered well into the half-cycle that follows the reversal. A normal dimmer gives you complete control over this delay, but a three-way touch switch only provides three preset delays. The medium setting has a medium delay while the dim setting has a long delay.

A touch lamp detects your touch by looking for changes in the electric properties of the lamp's surfaces. It monitors these properties by putting a fluctuating electric charge on them. As electric current flows toward the bulb through the lamp's wires, it passes through an electronic device that places a high frequency (about 60 kHz) alternating current onto those wires. This added current causes the lamp's surfaces to take on a small fluctuating electric charge--first positive, then negative, then positive, over and over again. This surface charging involves electrostatic forces, which extend long distances between charged objects, and occurs even though the lamp's surfaces aren't directly connected to the lamp's wires. The more surface the lamp has, the more easily it can hold that electric charge--the greater the lamp's electric capacitance.

When you plug the lamp in, the electronic device uses its fluctuating charge to determine how easy it is to add or subtract charge from the lamp's surfaces. In other words, it measures the lamp's capacitance. It then begins to look for changes in that capacitance. When you touch the lamp, or even come close to its surfaces, your body effectively adds to the lamp's surface and its capacitance increases significantly. The electronic device detects this increase in capacitance and switches the lamp's state from on to off or from off to on. The fact that you don't have to touch the lamp to affect its capacitance means that a touch lamp can have insulating paint on its metal surfaces yet still detect your touch. You can also buy touch lamp modules that plug into the wall and turn the lamp that's connected to them into a touch lamp. These modules are so sensitive to capacitance changes in the lamp that you can trigger them just by touching the lamp cord.

Like all incandescent bulbs, a halogen lamp creates its light as visible thermal radiation from an extremely hot tungsten wire. In fact, the wire in a halogen lamp is allowed to get even hotter than the one in a normal bulb. But while the glass envelope of a normal bulb gets only moderately hot during use, the glass envelope of a halogen bulb gets extremely hot. That's because the halogen bulb is using a chemical trick to keep tungsten atoms from getting away from the filament. Each time one of those tungsten atoms tries to leave, it's picked up by halogen molecules inside the glass envelope and returned to the filament. These halogen molecules can even pick the tungsten atoms up off the glass envelope and return them to the filament, but only if the glass envelope is allowed to get extremely hot. That's why the glass envelope of the halogen bulb is allowed to run so hot--if it weren't, it would accumulate the tungsten atoms permanently and it would darken. And since the tungsten atoms wouldn't be returned the filament, the filament wouldn't last as long.

You can usually judge the temperature of a hot object by its color--the brighter and whiter the light, the hotter the object. A candle flame has a temperature of roughly 1700° C while an incandescent light bulb has a temperature of about 2500° C. To my eye, a struck match briefly becomes brighter and whiter than a candle flame, so I would guess that its peak temperature is somewhere in the mid 2000° C range. Once the chemicals in the head have been used up, the flame temperature drops to about 1700° C.

The glass envelope of an incandescent bulb can't contain air because tungsten is flammable when hot and would burn up if there were oxygen present around it. One of Thomas Edison's main contributions to the development of such bulbs was learning how to extract all the air from the bulb. But a bulb that contains no gas won't work well because tungsten sublimes at high temperatures--its atoms evaporate directly from solid to gas. If there were no gas in the bulb, every tungsten atom that left the filament would fly unimpeded all the way to the glass wall of the bulb and then stick there forever. While there are some incandescent bulbs that operate with a vacuum inside, most common incandescent lamps contain a small amount of argon and nitrogen gases.

Argon and nitrogen are chemically inert, so that the tungsten filament can't burn in the argon and nitrogen, and each argon atom or nitrogen molecule is massive enough that when a tungsten atom that's trying to leave the filament hits it, that tungsten atom may rebound back onto the filament. The argon and nitrogen gases thus prolong the life of the filament. Unfortunately, these gases also convey heat away from the filament via convection. You can see evidence of this convection as a dark spot of tungsten atoms that accumulate at the top of the bulb. That black smudge consists of tungsten atoms that didn't return to the filament and were swept upward as the hot argon and nitrogen gases rose.

However, some premium light bulbs contain krypton gas rather than argon gas. Like argon, krypton is chemically inert. But a krypton atom is more massive than an argon atom, making it more effective at bouncing tungsten atoms back toward the filament after they sublime. Krypton gas is also a poorer conductor of heat than argon gas, so that it allows the filament to convert its power more efficiently into visible light. Unfortunately, krypton is a rare constituent of our atmosphere and very expensive. That's why it's only used in premium light bulbs, together with some nitrogen gas.

Incidentally, the filament in many incandescent bulbs is treated with a small amount of a phosphorus-based "getter" that reacts with any residual oxygen that may be in the bulb the first time the filament becomes hot. That's how the manufacturer ensures that there will be no oxygen in the bulb for the tungsten filament to react with.

Fluorescent tubes produce relatively little heat, so they're relatively fire safe already. However, incandescent light bulbs become very hot and you have to be careful with them to avoid fires. First, make sure that the bulb can get rid of its waste heat. That means that you shouldn't wrap the bulb in insulation because it needs to transfer its waste heat to the air. Second, keep flammable materials away from the bulb, particularly above the bulb since hot air from the bulb rises upward.

An incandescent light bulb produces light by heating a small filament of tungsten to about 2500° C. At that temperature, the thermal radiation that the filament emits includes a substantial amount of visible light. But the filament also emits a great deal of infrared light (heat light) and it also transfers heat via conduction and convection to the glass bulb around it. When you put your hand near the bulb, you feel both the infrared light and the heat that has worked its way to the surface of the bulb. The bulb feels hot.

In contrast, a fluorescent lamp tries to produce light without heat. It collides electrons with mercury atoms to produce an atomic emission of ultraviolet light. This ultraviolet light is then converted to visible light by the layer of white phosphor powders on the inside of the lamp's glass envelope. In principle, this whole activity can be performed without creating any thermal energy. However, many unavoidable imperfections cause the lamp to convert some of the electric energy it consumes into thermal energy. Nonetheless, the lamp only becomes warm rather than hot.

A halogen cooktop unit uses thermal radiation to transfer heat to a pot or pan. All objects emit thermal radiation, but that radiation isn't visible until an object's temperature is at least 500° C. At higher temperatures, a significant fraction of an object's thermal radiation is visible light. In a halogen cooktop unit, an electrically heated tungsten filament is heated to the point where it emits a large amount of thermal radiation. Since the filament is small, it takes only a second or two for the filament to reach full temperature and begin emitting its intense thermal radiation. Any dark object above the unit will absorb this thermal radiation and experience a rise in temperature. When you turn off the unit, the filament cools rapidly and stops emitting its thermal radiation. The filament itself is protected from oxygen in the air by a heat-resistant glass envelope that's filled with halogen gas. This gas helps to keep the filament intact and prevents it from depositing tungsten atoms on the insides of the glass envelope.

An incandescent lamp turns its electric power completely into heat. Even the visible light it gives off is actually thermal radiation. A fluorescent lamp tries not to produce heat--the light it produces is non-thermal (it doesn't involve hot materials). While a fluorescent lamp is only partly successful at not producing heat, it's still several times more energy efficient than an incandescent lamps--fluorescents produces several times as much illumination for the same amount of electric power. This statement is true both in summer and winter, although fluorescent bulbs lose some of their energy efficiencies in very cold or very hot weather. Fluorescent lamps work best at temperatures between about 15° C and 40° C.

A heat lamp is much like a normal incandescent lamp, except that the heat lamp's large filament operates at a much lower temperature. Because of this lower temperature, the filament emits relatively little visible light. Instead, it emits mostly invisible infrared light. While you can't see infrared light, you can feel it as heat. Looking at a heat lamp is no more dangerous than looking at the glowing coals in a fireplace. Their thermal radiation heats your skin and the surfaces of your eyes, and is likely to make you uncomfortable enough to turn away before it causes real damage. In contrast, ultraviolet light from a sunlamp can injure your skin and eyes without causing any immediate pain--it's only much later that you feel the sunburn on your skin and corneas. That's why a heat lamp is relatively safe while a sunlamp is not.

Years ago, many strings of Christmas lights consisted of about 20 or 30 light bulbs in series. In this series, electric current passed from one bulb to the next and deposited a small fraction of its energy in each bulb. The result was that each bulb glowed brightly so long as every bulb was working. If a single bulb burned out, the entire string went dark because no current could flow through the open circuit. If you replaced one of the bulbs in a working string with a special blinker bulb, the whole string would blink. The blinker bulb contained a tiny bimetallic switch thermostat that turned it off whenever the temperature rose above a certain point. At first, the bulb would glow and the whole string would glow with it. Then the thermostat would overheat and turn the bulb and string off. Then the thermostat would cool off enough to turn the bulb and string back on. This pattern would repeat endlessly.

But modern electronics has replaced the blinker bulbs with computers and transistor switches. Transistorized switches determine which bulbs or groups of bulbs receive current and glow at any given time and carefully timed switching can make patterns of light that appear to move or "chase." As for the problem with one failed bulb spoiling the string, a reader has informed me that the bulbs are now designed with a fail-safe feature. If a bulb's filament breaks, the sudden surge in voltage across that bulb activates this fail-safe mechanism. Wires inside the bulb connect to allow current to bypass that bulb completely. The remaining bulbs in the string glow a little more brightly than normal and their lives are shortened slightly as a result.

All objects emit thermal radiation--electromagnetic waves that are associated with the transfer of heat. That's because all objects contain electrically charged particles and whenever electrically charged particles accelerate, they emit electromagnetic waves. Since all objects have thermal energy in them, their electrically charged particles are always undergoing thermal motion and their thermally induced accelerations cause them to emit electromagnetic waves.

At normal temperatures, the electromagnetic waves of thermal radiation are too low in frequency and too long in wavelength for us to see. But when an object's temperature exceeds about 500° C, the object emits a dim glow. By 1800° C, the object emits the yellowish glow of a candle. By 2700° C, the object emits the yellowish-white light of an incandescent bulb. By 5800° C, the object emits the white light of the sun.

The mantle of a lantern is actually a ceramic ash. The silk itself burns away completely and leaves behind only of the oxides of materials that were incorporated in the silk mantle when it was manufactured. The principal oxide formed when the standard Welsbach mantle is burned is thorium oxide, with a few percent of cerium oxide and other oxides. This use of thorium oxide or thoria, is a rare example of a radioactive element (thorium is radioactive) permitted in common household use. Thoria glows brightly when heated because it can tolerate extremely high temperatures without melting and because it is a very effective emitter of thermal radiation at temperatures of roughly 2200° C.

The light emitted by these oxide mantles is shorter in average wavelength than can be explained simply by the temperature of the burning gases, so it isn't just thermal radiation at the ambient temperature. The mantle's unexpected light emission is called candoluminescence and is thought to involve non-thermal light emitted as the result of chemical reactions and radiative transitions involving the burning gases and the mantle oxides.

An incandescent light bulb works by heating a solid filament so hot that the filament's thermal radiation spectrum includes large amounts of visible light. A fluorescent tube uses an electric discharge in mercury vapor to produce ultraviolet light, which is then transformed into visible light by fluorescent phosphors on the inner surface of the tube. A gas discharge lamp uses an electric discharge in a gas inside that lamp (often high pressure mercury, or sodium vapor, or even neon) to produce visible light directly.

From comments that I've received over the web, this story is apparently true. However those bulbs must be operating at reduced power levels and are glowing dimly as a result. There is no magic filament material that can operate indefinitely at yellow-white heat. The life of a filament is determined by how quickly its atoms evaporate (actually sublime) from its surface. Modern tungsten filaments operate at about 2500° C. At that temperature, the filament loses atoms slowly enough that it lives for about 1000 hours. If you were to operate the filament several hundred degrees colder, it would live much, much longer but it wouldn't emit nearly as much light and what light it did emit would be relatively reddish. The design of incandescent bulbs is a trade-off of energy efficiency and operating life. Long-life bulbs are substantially less energy efficient than normal bulbs--you don't have to replace them as often but they cost more to operate. Getting back to Edison's bulbs: they can only live long lives by operating at less than normal temperatures. In that case, they may live a hundred years but have very poor energy efficiencies.

In a common incandescent light bulb, an electric current flows through a double-spiral coil of very thin tungsten wire. As the electric charges in the current flow through this tungsten filament, they collide periodically with the tungsten atoms and transfer energy to those tungsten atoms. The current gives up its energy to the tungsten filament and the filament's temperature rises to about 2500° C. While all objects emit thermal radiation, very hot objects emit some of the thermal radiation as visible light. A 2500° C object emits about 12% of its heat as visible light and this is the light that you see coming from the bulb. Most of the remaining heat emerges from the bulb as invisible infrared light or "heat" light. The glass enclosure shields the filament from oxygen because tungsten burns in air.

A three-way light bulb has two filaments inside it. One filament is smaller than the other, consuming less electricity and emitting less light. At the low light setting, only the smaller filament has current running through it and the bulb emits a dim light. At the medium light setting, only the larger filament has current running through it and the bulb emits a medium light. At the high light setting, both filaments have currents running through them and the bulb emits a bright light. To control the two filaments, the bulb has three electrical connections. The two filaments share one of the connection and each has one additional connection of its own. A complicated switch in the lamp determines whether to deliver current to one filament or the other or both. In each case, current flows toward the filament through one connection and returns from the filament through the other connection.

A 60 watt light bulb emits about 6 watts of visible light while wasting the remaining 54 watts of electric power as other forms of thermal energy. A candle probably also consumes about 60 watts of chemical energy (the paraffin wax) but emits much less than 3 watts of visible light. The light bulb is clearly not very efficient at converting electric power into visible light but the candle is even less efficient. That's because the candle flame operates at a lower temperature (about 1700° C) than the filament of the light bulb (about 2500° C) and the spectrum of light emitted by a hot object depends strongly on its temperature. The cooler flame emits relatively more infrared light and less visible light (particularly blue light) than the hotter filament.

Since only about 80% of the heat a 60-watt bulb releases is thermal radiation and only about 12% of that thermal radiation is visible light, the bulb emits about 6 watts of visible light. A halogen bulb is a little more efficient than this and a long-life bulb is a little less efficient than this.

Actually daylight is a form of incandescent light. Incandescent light is the thermal radiation emitted by a hot object such as the filament of a light bulb or the surface of the sun. But the spectrum of incandescent light emitted by an object depends on its temperature. Since the filament of an incandescent light bulb has a temperature of only about 2500° C, its light is much redder than the light emitted by the 6000° C sun. That's why photographs taken indoors with incandescent lighting turn out so orange--the light just isn't white, it's orange-red. So you can differentiate between sunlight and the light from an incandescent bulb by comparing the spectrums. Look for the relative intensities of red, green, and blue lights. Sunlight will have much more blue in it than light from an incandescent bulb.

To begin with, matter always emits radiation. That's because, at any temperature above absolute zero, the electrically charge particles in matter are in thermal motion and they accelerate frequently. Any time an electrically charged particle accelerates, it emits electromagnetic radiation. If you could cool matter to absolute zero, the thermal motion would vanish and the matter wouldn't emit radiation. However, absolute zero is an unreachable destination--it can't be achieved--so everything experiences thermal motion and emits radiation.

The issue of radiation emitted by a black hole is another story. For decades, people thought of a black hole as perfectly black--it absorbed radiation perfectly but emitted none itself. However, Stephen Hawking showed that a black hole does emit radiation and that it behaves like a normal blackbody: an object that emits thermal radiation characteristic of its temperature. The temperature of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass. For black holes of any reasonable size, this temperature is so extraordinarily low that the black hole emits very little Hawking radiation.

This radiation originates in the vicinity of the event horizon, the surface inside which the black hole's gravity finally becomes strong enough to prevent even light from escaping. At that surface, quantum fluctuations in which particles are temporarily created and destroyed can occasionally lead to the creation of a particle that escapes the black hole forever. In effect, two particles are created simultaneously, one of which falls into the black hole and is lost and the other of which escapes forever. The particle that falls into the black hole actually decreases the mass of the black hole, and the missing mass escapes with the other particle. As for whether the black hole causes this emission or is actually doing the emission, there is no difference. The only feature that the black hole has (other than electric charge and angular momentum) is its event horizon (actually a characteristic of its mass). If the event horizon is causing the particles to be created, then the black hole itself is at work creating those particles.

The life of an incandescent bulb depends almost exclusively on how many hours its filament has been hot. Since the bulb in a refrigerator is only on for a few minutes a day, it lasts for many years.

Regular (incandescent) light bulbs create light with a hot filament. This light is relatively reddish and contains very little blue, violet, or ultraviolet light. Since it comes from a hot, thermal source, this light covers all the wavelengths from infrared to the green and blue range of the spectrum continuously and smoothly, although its intensity peaks in the red and orange range of the spectrum. Fluorescent lights, on the other hand, create light through the fluorescence of atoms, molecules, and solids. The light is not created by hot materials so it contains certain regions of the spectrum, often including blue and violet light. Depending on the exact make-up of the fluorescent lamp, this light may include wavelengths that are particularly important to a plant's metabolic processes.

When they're operating, halogen bulbs become extremely hot, so you certainly wouldn't want to touch them then. But even when a bulb is cool, touching it would deposit greases and salts from your skin onto its surface. The aluminosilicate glass used in the lamp's envelope would be weakened when these salts are baked into the glass during the lamp's operation and the greases would scorch and darken the bulb's surface.

For a given type of light bulb, the higher wattage bulbs are more energy efficient. Each light bulb has some "overhead" of wasted power that goes into heating the supporting structure and glass envelope. The higher wattage bulbs produce a little more light per watt of power. But not all types of bulbs are equally efficient. Long life bulbs are the least energy efficient because they run cooler than normal bulbs. The filament lasts a long time, but wastes more power producing infrared light. Some "energy miser" bulbs aren't as good as normal bulbs. They may have lower wattages (typically 55 W instead of 60 W or 90 W instead of 100 W), but they actually produce significantly less light and thus consume more watts of power for each unit of light they produce. The most efficient incandescent bulbs are halogen lamps. These lamps, with their chemical recycling process, run substantially hotter than normal bulbs and produce more light per watt. They also last longer than normal light bulbs. They also produce whiter light (less red) and are just plain better bulbs than normal light bulbs. They cost more money up front, but it's worth it in most cases.

The lamp has four switch positions: off, filament 1 on, filament 2 on, and both filaments on. The bulb has three electrical connections to its filaments. One contact delivers electrical power to filament 1, another contact delivers electrical power to filament 2, and the third contact returns electricity from both filaments to the power plant. The switch carefully controls the flow of electricity to the two filaments so that at the low light setting, only the small filament is on, at the medium setting, only the large filament is on, and at the high setting, both filaments are on.

Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done to increase the efficiency of an incandescent bulb. It emits light by creating a very hot filament. Some of the filament's heat is emitted as visible light but most ends up as hot air or infrared light (which you cannot see). There are tricks used to increase the bulb's visible light output slightly (e.g. heating the filament hotter as in a halogen bulb or reducing the heat transport in the bulb gas as in a krypton bulb), but mostly there is nothing that can be done. Glass is about the best material for a bulb: it's clear and a relatively poor conductor of heat.

A normal incandescent lamp contains a double-wound tungsten filament inside a gas-filled glass bulb. By "double-wound", I mean that a very fine wire is first wound into a long, thin spiral and then this spiral is again wound into a wider spiral. While the final filament looks about 1 or 2 centimeters long, it actually contains about 1 meter of fine tungsten wire. When the bulb is on, an electric current flows through the filament from one end to the other. The electrons making up this current carry energy, both in their motion and in the forces that they exert on one another. As they flow through the fine tungsten wire, these electrons collide with the tungsten atoms and transfer some of their energy to those tungsten atoms. The tungsten atoms and the filament become extremely hot, typically about 2500° Celsius. Tungsten wire is used because it tolerates these enormous temperatures without melting and because it resists sublimation longer than any other material. Sublimation is when atoms "evaporate" from the surface of a solid. The gas inside the bulb is there to slow sublimation and extend the life of the filament.

Once the filament is hot, it tends to transfer heat to its colder surroundings. While much of its heat leaves the filament via convection and conduction in the gas and glass bulb, a significant fraction of this heat leaves the filament via thermal radiation. For any object that is hotter than about 500° Celsius, some of this thermal radiation is visible light and for an object that is about 2500° Celsius, about 10% is visible light. The light that you see from the bulb is the visible portion of its thermal radiation. However, most of the filament's thermal radiation is invisible infrared light. While you can feel this infrared light warming your hand, you can't see it. Because only about 80% of the electric power delivered to the bulb becomes thermal radiation and only about 12% of that thermal radiation is visible, an incandescent light bulb is only about 10% energy efficient. Other types of lamps, including fluorescent and gas discharge lamps, are much more energy efficient.

A heat-seeking missile studies the infrared light coming toward it from the sky in front of it. It uses a lens to form a real image of that light on an array of infrared sensors. If there is a hot object in front of the missile, that object will emit more infrared light than its surroundings and the missile's lens will form a bright image of the hot object on one of the infrared sensors. If the bright image falls on the central sensor, the missile will do nothing--it will flight straight ahead. But if the bright image falls on one of the side sensors, the missile will turn. It will turn by deflecting its rocket exhaust so that the missile begins to rotate in flight. As the missile rotates, the image of the hot object will move from one sensor to the next and it will eventually fall on the central sensor. At that point, the missile will stop turning and will flight straight ahead. Since the missile automatically turns to head toward the hot object, it will eventually fly right into the hot object and explode. A radar-seeking missile will do that same things, except that it will look for an object that is emitting lots of microwaves (radar), rather than lots of infrared light. A radar-guided missile is much more complicated, since it must first emit a burst of microwaves and then analyze the reflected microwaves to look for something to fly toward. Many laser-guided missiles are just like heat-seeking missiles except that they look for an object that is reflecting a laser beam. The people who fire the missile simply illuminate the target with a bright laser beam and the missile flies directly toward the laser spot on the target.

Since light carries energy with it, something must provide that energy. However, the energy doesn't have to come from electric power. Since objects emit visible thermal radiation when they have temperatures above about 500 C, anything that heats an object to high temperatures will make light. But light can also be made without heat. There are many ways to convert electric energy into light without making anything hot (for example, a neon sign or a light-emitting diode). But you ask about making light with electricity. The next best choice is light-emitting chemical reactions, such as those used in light sticks (liquid-filled plastic sticks that you bend to activate and which then glow bright green for about 12 hours). However, such reactions don't produce all that much light and they consume the chemicals fairly quickly. If you are trying to produce large amounts of light without electric power, I'm afraid that you'll have to burn sometime. That's what people did before 1879 and the electric lamp.

Since turning an incandescent bulb on and off doesn't shorten the life of its filament significantly, you do well to turn it off whenever possible. The same isn't true of a fluorescent tube--turning it on ages its filaments significantly (due to sputtering processes) so you shouldn't turn a fluorescent lamp off if you plan to restart it in less than about 1 minute.