alt Hacker NewsI find the physics of wavelength-dependent materials properties oddly satisfying. You can do clever things like this, extracting energy from different parts of the spectrum by combining materials and conversion processes. You can beam waste heat back to space through the atmosphere’s “infrared window”. You can explain global warming from first principles. Fascinating stuff!
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I'm current taking composite construction certification courses because modern manufacturing provides for customizing the material for very specific uses. Low volume production with very specific mechanical and physical properties.
Wait we could reflect back infrared heat into space and still collect solar energy as electricity - so doing two jobs at once in, say, a desert.
Re-greening at a profit?
I feel the same way about how fiber optics can create bandwidth by just slicing up the spectrum for different channels of data (my rudimentary understanding anyway). I like how even after all this time we find new and clever ways to work with light.
One thing I’m curious about this from the plant perspective - we’re pretty sure we’re passing everything relevant down to the plant, but nature doesn’t normally leave signal or energy lying around without leveraging it somewhere, so what don’t we know about how the broccoli use the parts we’ve been assuming they don’t?