Seeing the entire EM-band

[dragonbat2006]

Googled: Wikipedia on the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Also this Yahoo! Answers questionI'm working on an original novel about kids with superpowers and I'm trying to establish parameters for the abilities of one character. I've conceived her as able to perceive the entire EM-band and I'm trying to get a grip on the advantages and disadvantages

Comments

[cactuswren]

I doubt she'd be able to perceive anything more specific than an undifferentiated "glow" in long wavelengths: her eye would simply be physically too small to pick up the entire wavelength.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation#Electromagnetic_spectrum

Also, something as simple as being able to perceive ultraviolet will seriously throw off her color perception. Some white paints "glow" perceptibly in ultraviolet: I remember seeing a demonstration of two paint chips, lead white and zinc white. Photographed in visible light they looked the same, but with UV-sensitive film one was very bright and one was dark. Some flowers have ultraviolet "markings" that bees can see but humans cannot: your character might be able to see such things that other people had no perception of.

Infrared will have equally interesting effects: think of photographs taken in IR. On the one hand, it might be interesting to have a character who could (e.g.) look at a dozen identical cars and tell from a distance which of them had been driven in the past hour; on the other, the same landscape might look markedly different to her on a hot day or a cold, the same person would look different if they'd been standing outdoors in the cold or had just stepped out of a hot shower.

HTH.

[dragonbat2006]

It does! Thank you!

[illicitlearning]

On that topic, you might find it helpful to look at videos taken through UV and IR cameras (here's a few for UV and here's a few more for IR) to get a sense of how things look different in those spectra - also keep in mind that "ultraviolet" and "infrared" each cover a wide band of wavelengths (roughly comparable to visible light) so they probably won't each be just one color to her. Research what sorts of materials are UV and IR emissive, transmissive, reflective, and absorptive (for example, as demonstrated in the videos I linked, sunscreen is absorptive and a little reflective of UV, while normal glass is reflective in IR, so both materials would inhibit your character's vision).