Construct · 4 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningdispersioncompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to spectrum is dispersion.
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The band of colours a prism spreads white light into, and by extension the distribution of radiation intensity across wavelength or frequency. Newton reported in 1672 that a prism does not add colour to white light but separates the rays it already contains, each bent by a fixed amount, into an ordered series he named the spectrum. The referent is a physical fact about radiation: a measurable spread of energy over wavelength, read off an instrument. Later spectroscopy carried the same idea from visible light to the whole electromagnetic range. This meaning is about light and energy, not people or ideas, and it is the only one here whose spectrum you can photograph.[1]
A dimensional conception of a condition, on which presentations vary by degree rather than falling into a few discrete types. Wing and Gould reported in 1979 that social impairment, communication difficulty, and restricted activities co-occurred across a continuum of severity in children, and Wing later named this the autistic spectrum; DSM-5 then folded earlier separate diagnoses into a single autism spectrum disorder. The referent is the range of ways one condition presents across people, arranged on a graded axis. Here spectrum means a clinical continuum of a disorder, not a spread of light and not an arrangement of ideas. Nothing about wavelength survives the move.[2]
The arrangement of political ideologies along one or more axes, most familiarly the left-right line inherited from where deputies sat in the 1789 French National Assembly. Downs modelled party competition in 1957 as movement along a single left-right dimension on which voters and parties take positions. The referent is a space of ideological positions, not a physical quantity and not a medical range. A voter's place on the political spectrum is a summary of their views, arrived at by argument and self-report, with no natural zero and no instrument to read it. It shares only the picture of an ordered line with the optical and clinical meanings.[3]
The range of radio frequencies treated as a scarce, allocatable economic resource, licensed to users and increasingly assigned by auction. McMillan described in 1994 how the United States shifted from giving away spectrum rights to selling them, so that bands of frequency became property to be valued, divided, and traded. The referent is not the physics of radio waves but the legal right to transmit in a band, a resource an agency allocates and firms bid for. This is the same underlying frequencies as the physics meaning, renamed as an asset: here spectrum is something you own, not something you photograph.[4]
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