"What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on." ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau

Here is my take on a photo of a plasma globe. They now have small bulbs that can inserted directly into a light socket. Only the levels and color were adjusted, to change it from the normal blue/magenta color scheme to something a little different. Here is some rather dry reading for you, culled from the web: Sir William Crookes was an English chemist and physicist. Sir William attended the Royal College of Chemistry, in London, and worked on spectroscopy. In his investigations of the conduction of electricity in low pressure gases, he discovered that as the pressure was lowered, the negative electrode (cathode) appeared to emit rays (the so-called cathode rays, now known to be a stream of free electrons, and used in cathode ray display devices). As these examples indicate, he was a pioneer in the construction and use of vacuum tubes for the study of physical phenomena. He was, as a consequence, one of the first scientists to investigate what are now called plasmas. He also devised one of the first instruments for the study of nuclear radioactivity, the spinthariscope. Plasma was first identified in a Crookes tube, and so described by Sir William Crookes in 1879 (he called it "radiant matter"). The nature of the Crookes tube "cathode ray" matter was subsequently identified by British physicist Sir J.J. Thomson in 1897. Plasmas are by far the most common phase of matter in the universe, both by mass and by volume. All the stars are made of plasma, and even the space between the stars is filled with a plasma, albeit a very sparse one (See astrophysical plasma, interstellar medium and intergalactic space). In the solar system, the planet Jupiter accounts for most of the non-plasma, only about 0.1% of the mass and 10 to the -15% of the volume within the orbit of Pluto. Plasma is loosely described as an electrically neutral medium of positive and negative particles. In 1870 Crookes decided that science had a duty to study the preternatural phenomena associated with Spiritualism. Judging from family letters, Crookes had developed a favorable view of Spiritualism already by 1869. Nevertheless, he was determined to conduct his inquiry impartially. Among the phenomena he witnessed were movement of bodies at a distance, rappings, changes in the weights of bodies, levitation, appearance of luminous objects, appearance of phantom figures, appearance of writing without human agency, and circumstances which "point to the agency of an outside intelligence". -----

Thanks for your vibrant comments and birthday well-wishes on my previous upload, Dawn's Early Glow ----- Olympus C8080wz & PhotoshopCS. (1079) Boca Raton, FL, USA 2008 Sponsored by: Kramer Kreations