At the beginning there was light. Billions of years have passed, minds have been refined and instruments adjusted, from element to particle to wave and photon. Taking a particle that follows a straight line, some interesting consequences arise, it might be that I don’t understand optics as much as needed to explain why distance has influence on size of objects, but since we know of quanta and Einstein an interesting proposition arises.
Placing the Sun on the left, Earth in the middle and Jupiter on the right, with the lines highlighting rays of light as they reach the planets. Before we thought light was a wave, it must have travelled in a straight line. The problem arises when we consider that the Sun is millions of times larger than Earth and since light falls on the entire surface of the Earth facing towards the Sun. The entire sky should be covered with the tiny surface area size of Earth on the Sun; same as looking at the Sun point blank, no matter where you are on Earth there would be no escaping, horizon to horizon. The same rules apply to any source of light on the dark side of the Earth, a light shining directly towards an observer should be the same size be it a meter or two away, it’s not.
Optics could account for this, our eyes bend light, the brain interprets the inputs and therefore in distance objects appear smaller, this is fine to some limit. Look at the Sun, it spans from horizon to horizon, most of the light coming from a small area of Sun that Earth is facing. I doubt that out eyes could compress an image of such magnitude, especially when Earth is staring at a inconvenient one millionth piece of the Sun.
Wave and quantum theories of light offer a solution, however I’m not a nuclear scientist and wiki doesn’t seem to offer a clean interpretation of these two theories relating to optics. Following is to the best of my understanding.
On the left is a source of light, as represented in wave theory, the ripples are a single light wave that is moving trough time (isolated), on the right is quantum representation of the same light source (two waves of them). To explain why the Sun doesn’t cover our entire sky, if the waves are stretching as they expand in all directions simultaneously, that expansion is the distance size relationship. Further away from the source, more stretched the wave is and a smaller amount of energy reaches our eyes. Our eyes detect the energy and wavelength of the ripples that reach them. Wavelength can be reconstructed without too much distortion from other light sources.
In quantum perspective, light becomes a particle of energy that behaves as a wave (photon), does it split to cover the distance, does it compress or stretch?
