One of Nikola Tesla's late night "party trick" demonstrations, in the era where people such as Mark Twain would come to his New York City lab, was to light up the room bright as day with no obvious source. (Tesla: Man out of Time by Margaret Cheney)
(If I made an error in these estimations please let me know.)
I am curious if generating such light was by means of creating an oscillator that resonated in the visible light spectrum. Given visible light between 470 and 650 nm, let's pick 500 nm. The frequency would be f=c/wavelength = (300x10^6 meters per second)/(500x10^-9 meters)= 0.6x10^-15 = 600x10^12 Hz, or 600 THz.
That's an insanely high frequency! Consider 2.4 GHz from your kitchen microwave or WiFi, 1 terahertz is of course 1000x greater than 1 gigahertz...
With L and C components at that frequency, even with a 1 pF capacitor,
L = 1/((6.28^2)*((600x10^12)^2)*1x10^-12) = 70.4x10^-21 or 70.4 zeptohenries of inductance! That's three jumps smaller than pico on the SI scale https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Units/frames.html
Either way, the inductance or capacitance would have to be incredibly tiny. How would one create an oscillator that could run at 600 or so THz, with either modern technology, or just what was available in Tesla's day? I recall reading there are some airport security scanner technologies operating in the low THz in development, but don't recall those articles getting into detail about the components or design of such an oscillator.
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Brian Hall
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