Thermal Camera Germanium real heat radiation experiment.
My morning experiment. This is what I do these days, teach (sometimes before class I play these 'toys' with my students), research and write ... and exercise in between. Germanium is interesting to me as it shares, as a solid, a property most of the air does; it is said to be transparent to thermal (infrared) radiation. Just as an afterthought, the tape can leak infrared radiation, so it is not a perfect (blackbody) absorber of infrared radiation, but is very close. I am interested in the detector. I think it is the most important detector humans have ever developed (outside the compass). In fact, it helped us understand magnetism and its connection to light. It is the thermopile and its kin, in this demonstration, the bolometer (the thermal camera). But is it old, 19th-century, as is, as a result of the detector, our common knowledge of heat radiation. This instrument is central to greenhouse theory (it defines the greenhouse gases) and quantum mechanics. It is the detector...