The search continues....

Just as a point of reference...

I have always felt that the K.I.S.S. theory works for all things. I also believe that Occam's razor was as relevant as the KISS theory. All things being equal, the simplest solution is the most probable.

All light emits energy in the form of particles called photons.

Photosynthesis is, of course, the process on which most life on earth depends. Radiant energy from the sun is converted into chemical energy. The energy is stored in chemical bonds in sugars like glucose and fructose. The pigments in a plant mostly absorb light that is red or blue, a small portion of the visible light spectrum, while most other colors are reflected. Plants appear green because they reflect the green light in the middle of the spectrum.

Phototropism is the plant's movement in response to light. Growth hormones are produced which cause the stem cells on the side away from the light to multiply causing the stem to tilt. The leaves are then closer to the light source and aligned to intercept the most light. Blue lighting is most notable in summer and will encourage the plant to grow vegetation. Red and blue light combined as seen in spring encourages a plant to flower. A combination of other spectrum colors or dark light will see the plant grow leggy and sparse and eventually inhibit the plants ability to photosynthesize eventually killing the plant. Plants need a limited spectrum of at least blue or red light to thrive.

The most interesting response is photoperiodism. This is the plant's reaction to dark and is controlled by the phytochrome pigment in the leaves. The pigment shifts between two forms based on whether it receives more red or far red light. The reaction controls several different plant reactions including seed germination, stem elongation, dormancy, and blooming in day length sensitive plants.

I found an interesting elementary school experiment on this here… http://www.education.com/science-fair/article/light-affects-plant-growth/

Electromagnetic Field
What are electromagnetic waves made out of? Unlike ordinary sound or water waves, electromagnetic waves are not the result of the oscillations of any underlying medium. So what is the entity that is undergoing wave motion? To answer this question, we need to introduce the concept of a field. An electric charge could be best understood by postulating a physical entity that exists in its own right, and carries the effects of the charge. This entity is called a field. So, for example: if we introduce an electric charge into a space, the electric charge generates an electric field which then acts on say other charges. If the charge introduced is a positive charge, the field will act on other neighboring charges and create an attractive force on negative charges and a repulsive force on positive charges and so on. The fundamental and unique feature of a field, in contrast with a particle, is that the field is spread all over space, whereas the particle occupies a definite position in space. A particle is described by specifying its position in space, and in three dimensions, this means specifying three numbers, namely the particles X,Y and Z coordinates. In contrast, the electric field, for example, is described by assigning numerical value for the field at every point in space. In other words, a field is a function of space (and of time theoretically), and has much more information than say a particle. The field is a material entity that is as physical and as "substantial" as a particle. Just like a particle, a field has energy, momentum, angular momentum, entropy and so on.

A wave is an example of a field, and is spread over space. In addition to the electric field, we also have the magnetic field. The magnetic field, for example, describe how two magnets affect each other.

(The great discovery of Faraday and Maxwell was the understanding that electric and magnetic fields are really the same entity, and appear to be different only in certain special circumstances. )

A charge moving with a constant velocity, for example, generates a combination of both electric and magnetic fields. Furthermore, by transforming from one inertial frame to another, the values of the electric and magnetic fields change, showing that these are frame dependent, and not physical, quantities. The electric and magnetic fields E and B are generated by arbitrary collections of moving charges. E(t,x) and B(t,x) are vectors that depend on time, and are spread all over space; what this means is that at every instant t, at every point x in space there are three real numbers that specify the electric field, and similarly for the magnetic field. In other words, we need an infinite collection of vectors, one for each instant t and each point x to specify the electric and magnetic fields.

Electromagnetic Waves
An accelerating charge generates electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic fields are a special case of transverse waves. As is the case for any wave propagation, energy has to be constantly pumped into the system, in this case, the work done to accelerate a charged particle for sustaining electromagnetic waves.



Intuitively speaking, if one attaches an electric charge to the end of a stick, and shakes the stick back and forth with a frequency f , the charge will "radiate off" electromagnetic waves of frequency f . The energy in the waves comes from the energy being expended in shaking the charge. The only reason that the radiation that we create by shaking a piece of stick is not easily observable is because the amplitude of the radiation is very low, making detection difficult. An antenna is not much different from our picture, since in an antennae charge is made to flow back and forth (with some frequency) along the length of an antennae, and results in the emission of electromagnetic radiation. Radio waves are generated in this manner, and constitute the signals that are up picked by a radio receiver. Electromagnetic radiation is the result of the simultaneous oscillations of electric and magnetic fields. A changing electric field creates a magnetic field, and in turn, a changing magnetic field creates an electric field. It is this positive feedback mechanism that sustains the propagation of electromagnetic wave over billions of light years of distance. Since the electric field E and magnetic field B are three-dimensional vectors, the propagation of radiation is only possible in three-dimensions. For simplicity sake, let's study the electric and magnetic fields far from the charges that have generated the radiation.

Suppose the electromagnetic wave is propagating in vacuum in a single direction. Since the electromagnetic radiation is a transverse wave, the oscillations of the electric and magnetic field are in the directions perpendicular to the direction of propagation, and hence lie in the yz -plane. Let us then put the unit vector in the xyz -directions by ex, ey and ez respectively. The simplest example of radiation is given by the electric field E always lying along the y -axis, and the magnetic field B always lying along the z –axis, with the added property that all electromagnetic waves propagate in vacuum at the speed of light.



The electric and magnetic fields that constitute electromagnetic wave propagation are given by...

E(t,x) =
B(t,x) =



The propagation of the radiation is shown with the direction of propagation being in the x-direction, and the oscillations of the E and B field drawn in the yz-planes.





I am not rejecting your idea; on the contrary I love it. This is a simplified explanation of the theories and current understanding that will go into the exploration of it.

Oh, I just had a great idea… tape a glow stick onto the end of a stick. Then wave it up and down in a dark room. That will give a better visual of frequency (f). Then if you move your arm from one side to the other while waving the stick up and down and forward and back (while in front of a mirror) it would be a better representation of wave propagating in the zy plane along the x axis.

And it might be fun!

RALEIGH, N.C.

Hardly articulate, the tiny strangleweed, a pale parasitic plant, can sense the presence of friends, foes, and food, and make adroit decisions on how to approach them.

Mustard weed, a common plant with a six-week life cycle, can't find its way in the world if its root-tip statolith - a starchy "brain" that communicates with the rest of the plant - is cut off.

The ground-hugging mayapple plans its growth two years into the future, based on computations of weather patterns. And many who visit the redwoods of the Northwest come away awed by the trees' survival for millenniums - a journey that, for some trees, precedes the Parthenon.

As trowel-wielding scientists dig up a trove of new findings, even those skeptical of the evolving paradigm of "plant intelligence" acknowledge that, down to the simplest magnolia or fern, flora have the smarts of the forest. Some scientists say they carefully consider their environment, speculate on the future, conquer territory and enemies, and are often capable of forethought - revelations that could affect everyone from gardeners to philosophers.

Indeed, extraordinary new findings on how plants investigate and respond to their environments are part of a sprouting debate over the nature of intelligence itself.

"The attitude of people is changing quite substantially," says Anthony Trewavas, a plant biochemist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a prominent scholar of plant intelligence. "The idea of intelligence is going from the very narrow view that it's just human to something that's much more generally found in life."

To be sure, there are no signs of Socratic logic or Shakespearean thought, and the subject of plant "brains" has sparked heated exchanges at botany conferences. Plants, skeptics scoff, surely don't fall in love, bake soufflés, or ponder poetry. And can a simple reaction to one's environment truly qualify as active, intentional reasoning?

But the late Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist Barbara McClintock called plant cells "thoughtful." Darwin wrote about root-tip "brains." Not only can plants communicate with each other and with insects by coded gas exhalations, scientists say now, they can perform Euclidean geometry calculations through cellular computations and, like a peeved boss, remember the tiniest transgression for months.

To a growing number of biologists, the fact that plants are now known to challenge and exert power over other species is proof of a basic intellect.
"If intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, then, absolutely, plants are intelligent," agrees Leslie Sieburth, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

For philosophers, one of the key findings is that two cuttings, or clones, taken from the same "mother plant" behave differently even when planted in identical conditions.

"We now know there's an ability of self-recognition in plants, which is highly unusual and quite extraordinary that it's actually there," says Dr. Trewavas. "But why has no one come to grips with it? Because the prevailing view of a plant, even among plant biologists, is that it's a simple organism that grows reproducibly in a flower pot."

But here at the labs on the North Carolina State campus, where fluorescent grow-rooms hold genetic secrets and laser microscopes parse the inner workings of live plants, there is still skepticism about the ability of ordinary houseplants to intellectualize their environment.

Most plant biologists are still looking at the mysteries of "signal transduction," or how genetic, chemical, and hormonal orders are dispersed for complex plant behavior. But skeptics say it's less a product of intelligence than mechanical directives, more genetic than genius. Some see the attribution of intelligence to plants as relative - an oversimplification of a complex human trait. And despite intensifying research, exactly how a plant's complex orders are formulated and carried out remains draped in leafy mystery.

"There is still much that we do not know about how plants work, but a big part of intelligence is self-consciousness, and plants do not have that," says Heike Winter Sederoff, a plant biologist at N.C. State.

Still, a new NASA grant awarded to the university to study gravitational effects on crop plants came in part due to new findings that plants have neurotransmitters very similar to humans' - capable, perhaps, of offering clues on how gravity affects more sentient beings. The National Science Foundation has awarded a $5 million research grant to pinpoint the molecular clockwork by which plants know when to grow and when to flower.

The new field of plant neurobiology holds its first conference - The First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology - in May in Florence, Italy.

The debate is rapidly moving past the theoretical. In space, "smart plants" can provide not only food, oxygen, and clean air, but also valuable companionship for lonely space travelers, say some - a boon for astronauts if America is to go to Mars. Research on the workings of the mustard weed's statolith, for example, may one day yield a corn crop with 1-3/8 the gravitational force of Earth.

Some Earth-bound farmers, meanwhile, see the possibility of communicating with plants to time waterings for ultimate growth. A new gene, Bypass-1, found by University of Utah researchers, may make that possible.

Still, it can be hard for the common houseplant to command respect - even among those who study it most closely.

"When I was a postdoc, I had a neighbor who watched me buy plants, forget to water them, and throw them out, buy them and throw them out," says Dr. Sieburth. "When she found out I had a PhD in botany, I thought she was going to die."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0303/p01s03-usgn.html