sammystingray , thanks for taking the time to explain some more. I was thinking about what Cap'n Pete and Sal T Nutz said at work today and realized that I was still confused <img src="graemlins//confused.gif" border="0" alt="[confused]" />
I was thinking about the same thing you said about heating a metal bar. As it gets hotter, the light that it emits should changes from red, then to white, then eventually to blue. Red being in the lower spectrum and blue in the high.
I was thinking that in order to get blue light, you would either have to add more juice or wattage to make it burn hotter (brighter). That is why I would think that a 20000K bulb would be brighter because it burns hotter. So hot that the light turns blue. Which would suggest that the photons being emitted are stronger and can penetrate deeper. I was thinking that since 20000K bulbs emits light near the blue section of the spectrum, it would be brighter (brighter than white light). I also think that heat and light are related. The hotter it is, the brighter it becomes. So a 20000K bulb would be brighter than a 6500K bulb because it burns hotter. I thought that in order to make it hotter, you just add more juice (watts) but yet there are bulbs with the same wattage that gives off heat in differing Kelvins. And that is what confused me.
Then I started to think further <img src="graemlins//confused2.gif" border="0" alt="[confused2]" /> I figure that in order to get blue light, you can either juice it up with so much wattage that it burns blue, or you can get a regular bulb and paint it blue, or you can get a bulb and somehow isolate all the other colors and just allow the blue to pass through. Then I thought that the 20000K bulbs has to use one of these methods. I doubt that it would be the last 2 methods or they would be falsely advertising "20000K."
Then I started to think that the brightness of a bulb is determined by how hot you can get it. And how hot you can get it is determined by how many watts you give it OR by what technology you use. For example, there are 10000K, 20000K, 6500K bulbs with the same wattage.
I was also thinking that a 20000K bulb would be brighter than a 6500K bulb because it burns hotter. That is why the 20000K bulb looks blue and the 6500K one looks red. Red light is cooler than white, and white is cooler than blue light.
I don't think that the measurements in Kelvin is just what color the light is, because the color of light (not artificially colored) tells how hot it is, and how hot it is determines how bright it is. This is why I thought that brightness was determined by Kelvin and not by wattage. For instance, suppose you have a wire the size of a hair and another one the size of your thigh (pretending that both have extremely high metling points). Suppose you have to use 100W of power to make the smaller wire hot enough to emit white light. It would take more than 100W to make the bigger wire emit the same amount of light as the small one. That is why I thought that brightness was not determined by wattage.
OH! then I really started to think <img src="graemlins//bah.gif" border="0" alt="[bah]" /> about adding more bulbs to make it brighter. I mean does two 55W bulbs make it twice as bright as one 55W bulb? I hear about people getting four 50W bulbs so they can have 200W lighting. This doesn't make sense to me. For example, I have five 20W bulbs in my bathroom (the light is kind of yellowish and dim) and I have a 100W bulb in my room (bright white light). My room looks way brighter than my bathroom. Now if I add the 5 20W bulbs together, it would be 100W, but it's nowhere close to being as bright as one 100W bulb. The only benefit that i see of adding more bulbs is that it covers more space; but it does not add to its brightness. So does that mean if I have four 50W bulbs in my tank that I have only 50W of light? Or do I have 200W of light?
If you're still with me, you must have a lot time on your hand
I have an idea.... I think I need to stop thinking
<img src="graemlins//confused2.gif" border="0" alt="[confused2]" />
