More Of My Pointless Background Noise On Light

[Immediacracy]

I've got very limited knowledge of both classical and quantum physics, but (unsurprisingly) I'm not letting that stop me from trying to extract a coherent set of fresh perspectives on the nature of light.[1]

1. Electromagnetic radiation, including visible light[2], travels at a velocity equal to c through a vacuum.[3]

2. c is "an upper bound on the speed at which energy, matter, and information can travel[4]"

What interests me about the speed of light being an upper limit for physical velocity is that the idea of an upper limit to velocity in general invites a different perspective on velocity from what we commonly experience. c is not so much a speed, but the opposite of stillness. It is absolute motion. It represents the behavior of physical existence[5] at it's most un-particulate; fully 'switched on' and unbound.

3. A photon is a unit (or quanta) of energy. It's not a material object exactly, it's the 'traveling' record of an event, specifically an electron dropping into a closer orbit around the nucleus (after being knocked into a higher orbit temporarily following a collision with another particle or energy).

4. A photon is a wave but without substance a physical content. It propagates in a vacuum, and space is a vacuum (not a volume of an undetectable substance, like ether).

5. A ray or beam of light does not appear visibly as a beam unless there is a particulate (or other beam-splitting obstruction) within the range of the light source to scatter the light before it reaches it's target.

Based on those points, does it make sense to conceive of light as something which jumps from one electron to another, much like electricity is conducted through a wire by triggering adjacent electrons to jiggle rather than sending any particular electron down the entire wire.

Maybe the difference with photons is that they jiggle electrons even if they are separated by any distance in a vacuum?[6] They don't need to be physically adjacent to each other. Since c is the velocity of absolute motion, the time it takes for light to manifest at it's destination is a measure of  itself and not a representation of the duration of an object physically moving through space. It's more like processing time or the time it takes for information to propagate through a network.

The fact that gravity and electromagnetism can alter and bend the 'path' of light, could be an aspect of signal processing rather than a physical manipulation of a stream of light particles. Light doesn't 'enter a prism', it excites the prism in a particular way so that the excitement of the light source is simulated by the release of light from the prism, the surfaces the prism reflects against, and the interior of the retina.

We already know that our visual experience of light is actually not light itself but a neurological simulation. Electromagentism is no more what light looks like to us than what it feels like as heat. Just as information carried by light is transduced through our optical and neurological systems as image, light itself could be instantaneously transduced between material nodes.

The longer you point a telescope into space, the more distant light you can sample. Perhaps this isn't a matter of emitted particles being collected like insects on flypaper but rather some kind of cosmic latency as electromagnetic signal news is drowned out by all of the non-signal. Dark noise.

I know, it probably sounds strange, and maybe someone can explain to me in layman's terms why this it's blindingly obvious that this is not the case, but I think it makes sense intuitively. The idea of light as a phenomenon which jumps between spaces rather than travels through them seems like it explains how light seems to behave. Light silently flashes or glows. It illuminates. It doesn't collect in pools or solidify into a crust. It doesn't age or change. It's a phenomenon which is an effect of matter that has an effect on matter, but it isn't matter. Light is an information process which manifests physically.

1.	Please feel free to correct my information or contribute your own understanding. Unsupported opinions about my ideas or speculations about my opinions of my ideas, or any comments related to judgments about my personality, sanity, intentions, qualifications, the ridiculous over-footnoting etc, are hereby rejected in advance. Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.
2.	gamma rays may travel slightly faster than lower frequencies of e-m
3.	From the wiki Speed of Light: The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than c. The ratio between c  and the speed v at which light travels in a material is called the refractive index n of the material (n = c / v). For example, for visible light the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at c / 1.5 ? 200,000 km/s; the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is very close to c. (To me, this means to that the sparkle of diamonds represents something of a traffic jam of light.)
4.	I'm not sure that I agree with the 'information' part
5.	Edit: changed from 'matter'
6.	consistent with quantum communication/entanglement, right?

[Immediacracy]

Here's an example I'm thinking about:

A microwave oven cooks without heat. I think it could be said that it's a technology which signals food to cook itself.

Insane, right?

Maybe not. I'm no expert on microwaves, obviously, but my understanding is that the frequency of the energy is narrow enough in the microwave range that it vibrates (or inspires the vibration of) only molecules of a certain size (or something?) - in this case water molecules. No hot air, no hot oven (and maybe faster cooking time due to the specificity of the direct excitation of the water molecules rather than having to excite all the air and metal to the point where it cooks the food).

Said another way, a microwave oven propagates a focused condition of electronic enthusiasm. It's like a cosmic currency, say a deposit into a bank account of energy which transforms the quanta of the account. A debit for a credit, nothing more. No coins flying through the air. No sacks of cash bouncing off of the walls of the bank vault - just pure information teleported from station to station.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEWgIzm7F2U[/youtube]

[Cyberia]

2. c is "an upper bound on the speed at which energy, matter, and information can travel[1]"

1.	I'm not sure that I agree with the 'information' part

Well, what are you going to use to send the information?  Light?  Ah, now you see the problem.  Seriously, figure this one out in a practical way, and you'll be bigger than Jesus.

What interests me about the speed of light being an upper limit for physical velocity is that the idea of an upper limit to velocity in general invites a different perspective on velocity from what we commonly experience. c is not so much a speed, but the opposite of stillness. It is absolute motion. It represents the behavior of matter at it's most un-particulate; fully 'switched on'.

Right.  A photon is motion. That's also represented by the fact that a photon has no rest-mass.  If you stop it, it ceases to exist.

This has a secondary effect of decoupling the meaning of "c" from the speed of light.  "c" would then defined as the "maximum speed" through some other physical mechanism.  A photon travels at c ONLY because it has no rest-mass.  In other words, it travels at whatever the maximum speed happens to be.  As such, there is NO value in studying light/photons to understand why c=299,792,458 m/s instead of any other value.

What do you study if you want to discover the nature of the maximum speed?

The Vacuum.

Which is why there is a lot of chatter about quantum-foam, virtual-particles, dark energy, the cosmological constant, and inflation on the physics channels. 

3. A photon is a unit of energy. It's not a material object exactly, it's the 'traveling' record of an event, specifically an electron dropping into a closer orbit around the nucleus (after being knocked into a higher orbit temporarily following a collision with another particle or energy.

No, to the first.  Sometimes, to the second. 

1) Photons are quanta of energy, not units.  Different photons have different amounts of energy.....some photons have more units of energy than other photons.  Understand?

2) Not ALL photons are the result of an electron changing levels, LOTS of other phenomena produce them too.  But your description isn't otherwise wrong.

4. A photon is a wave but without substance. It propagates in a vacuum, and space is a vacuum (not a volume undetectable substance, like ether).

Since E=mc², photons have relativistic mass, determined by frequency alone.  Because of that they also have momentum.  Reconsider "without substance."

Based on those points, does it make sense to conceive of light as something which jumps from one electron to another, much like electricity is conducted through a wire by triggering adjacent electrons to jiggle rather than sending any particular electron down the entire wire.

Maybe the difference with photons is that they jiggle electrons even if they are separated by any distance in a vacuum?[2]

2.	consistent with quantum communication/entanglement, right?

Except, more than electrons emit photons.  But, particularly from the point-of-view of the photon, that might be true, assuming you expand beyond just electrons.

They don't need to be physically adjacent to each other. Since c is the velocity of absolute motion, the time it takes for light to manifest at it's destination is a measure of  itself and not a representation of the duration of an object physically moving through space. It's more like processing time or the time it takes for information to propagate through a network.

Then one would not expect t=d/v, but it is.

The longer you point a telescope into space, the more distant light you can sample. Perhaps this isn't a matter of emitted particles being collected like insects on flypaper but rather some kind of cosmic latency as electromagnetic signal news is drowned out by all of the non-signal. Dark noise.

Or more likely it's just farther away and due to the inverse-square law very faint.... a fact backed up by redshift.

[xphobe]

a technology which signals food to cook itself.
...
a focused condition of electronic enthusiasm.

Are you a writer?  Because whether the concepts are technically correct or not, you do have an enjoyable way with words.   (and yeah that's my unsupported opinion, but it was meant in a positive way)

The way it was explained to me, water molecules are polar, so they have a positive and a negative end.  An oscillating EM field causes the molecules to flip end for end.  This causes friction with surrounding molecules so the food heats up.

By the way, I haven't ever read that gamma rays have a different speed than any other form of EM.  Got a link for me?

[Immediacracy]

Well, what are you going to use to send the information?  Light?  Ah, now you see the problem.  Seriously, figure this one out in a practical way, and you'll be bigger than Jesus.

Right. The way I'm thinking about it, propagating information through a physical medium applies the constraints of the medium, I'm just not convinced that information can't exist without a medium - or, said another way, I don't know that information 'exists' so much as informs existence. I'd call information essential rather than existential.

Right.  A photon is motion. That's also represented by the fact that a photon has no rest-mass.  If you stop it, it ceases to exist.

That's a great point. I'm going to have to let the implications of that soak in for a while. All motion is photons then. Heat>light>motion>energy all the same thing. True? Conceptually (alchemically) I think of gravity as anti-electromagnetism and the same as time-space. I think if that were scientifically true though I would have heard it said that way.

This has a secondary effect of decoupling the meaning of "c" from the speed of light.  "c" would then defined as the "maximum speed" through some other physical mechanism.  A photon travels at c ONLY because it has no rest-mass.  In other words, it travels at whatever the maximum speed happens to be.  As such, there is NO value in studying light/photons to understand why c=299,792,458 m/s instead of any other value.

Right. I tried to word it to make that distinction, although for where I went with it, it's the idea of c being the condition of 'least-possible-resistance' in material phenomenon.

What do you study if you want to discover the nature of the maximum speed?

The Vacuum.

Which is why there is a lot of chatter about quantum-foam, virtual-particles, dark energy, the cosmological constant, and inflation on the physics channels.  

Good point there too. It's harder for me to conceptualize a vacuum though.

1) Photons are quanta of energy, not units.  Different photons have different amounts of energy.....some photons have more units of energy than other photons.  Understand?

Oh, interesting. I mean it seems like informally the two terms are interchangeable ('some photons have more quanta of energy' than other photons), but you are saying that units of energy is formal term. Good to know.

2) Not ALL photons are the result of an electron changing levels, LOTS of other phenomena produce them too.  But your description isn't otherwise wrong.

I suspected that actually but thanks for clarifying. Any memorable examples off the top of your head? Atomic nuclei losing 'real estate' during fission or fusion comes to mind. Whole lotta photons there. Gotta be something related to percussive/acoustic properties in there...

Since E=mc², photons have relativistic mass, determined by frequency alone.  Because of that they also have momentum.  Reconsider "without substance."

I'm going to have to look up relativistic mass, but yeah, thanks. What about the idea that e-m waves have substantial impact? Could the relativistic mass be more of a mathematical description than a phenomenological observation?

Except, more than electrons emit photons.  But, particularly from the point-of-view of the photon, that might be true, assuming you expand beyond just electrons.

Sure, I'm open to that. Electrons are just the example I'm most familiar with.

They don't need to be physically adjacent to each other. Since c is the velocity of absolute motion, the time it takes for light to manifest at it's destination is a measure of  itself and not a representation of the duration of an object physically moving through space. It's more like processing time or the time it takes for information to propagate through a network.

Then one would not expect t=d/v, but it is.

I think I would though? There is still signal attenuation, not due to distance but distance between nodes. There is no resistance in the space between the nodes, but t scales to some rate of vector-address resolution that increases as a probability function of there being so many more possible information paths between the two nodes. Obviously this is outside the edge of my range, but I feel like I'm still in the right ballpark.

Or more likely it's just farther away and due to the inverse-square law very faint.... a fact backed up by redshift.

You're probably right. Can you help me understand why the mathematics and redshift would not look the same were it a tele-nodal phenomenon rather than a transportation phenomenon?

[Immediacracy]

Are you a writer?  Because whether the concepts are technically correct or not, you do have an enjoyable way with words.   (and yeah that's my unsupported opinion, but it was meant in a positive way)

The way it was explained to me, water molecules are polar, so they have a positive and a negative end.  An oscillating EM field causes the molecules to flip end for end.  This causes friction with surrounding molecules so the food heats up.

By the way, I haven't ever read that gamma rays have a different speed than any other form of EM.  Got a link for me?

Ah, thanks man, 'ppreciate it. I've only written professionally a few times when I was in college, but I'm open to an opportunity to do something like that again someday.

The gamma ray thing was just mentioned on this forum here. (marcus: ...In the modified theory not all light travels the same speed in vacuum. Very energetic gammaray photons are predicted to go just a wee bit faster.)

[Cyberia]

Well, what are you going to use to send the information?  Light?  Ah, now you see the problem.  Seriously, figure this one out in a practical way, and you'll be bigger than Jesus.

Right. The way I'm thinking about it, propagating information through a physical medium applies the constraints of the medium, I'm just not convinced that information can't exist without a medium - or, said another way, I don't know that information 'exists' so much as informs existence. I'd call information essential rather than existential.

Well, it does seem that way, but study Relativity more and you'll see that there does seem to be a prohibition against information traveling faster-than-light regardless of the method.  No mater what you try, it doesn't work out.  Example:  While quantum entanglement works FTL, it can NOT transmit information FTL.

It really, really seems that the universe has a speed limit on information.   I'll grant you metaphysical points there.

2) Not ALL photons are the result of an electron changing levels, LOTS of other phenomena produce them too.  But your description isn't otherwise wrong.

I suspected that actually but thanks for clarifying. Any memorable examples off the top of your head? Atomic nuclei losing 'real estate' during fission or fusion comes to mind. Whole lotta photons there. Gotta be something related to percussive/acoustic properties in there...

Matter-antimatter annihilation, pair-production, Gamma-ray burst, Cherenkov radiation - There's a few cool ones. 

Regarding acoustic properties:  Indeed, the CMB itself has acoustic waves throughout it.  You can listen to creation...... (There is a website that plays the audio, don't have the link)

Since E=mc², photons have relativistic mass, determined by frequency alone.  Because of that they also have momentum.  Reconsider "without substance."

I'm going to have to look up relativistic mass, but yeah, thanks. What about the idea that e-m waves have substantial impact? Could the relativistic mass be more of a mathematical description than a phenomenological observation?

Solar sails, radiation pressure

It's real, it's literally what holds up stars against gravity.


A bit of an aside:
There is a special class of supernova, called  a pair-production supernova that can occur in very large stars containing nothing but hydrogen and whatever helium they've produced.  (First generation stars fit this perfectly)

Basically, the temperature of the core rises as the star ages, the photons released by nuclear fusion get more and more energetic.  At some point they become so energetic that multiple photons get created from one fusion event.  This conserves energy and momentum, but does NOT conserve pressure.  Two low energy photons do not exert as much outward pressure as a single really energetic one.  This causes an immediate runaway effect.  The core immediately begins to shrink, temperature rises.  But this only makes it worse, because it's the temperature causing the pair-production. 

More pair-production -> More temperature -> More pair-production -> More temperature ->  More pair-production -> More temperature

Once very, very first occurrence of pair-production begins, a runaway explosion occurs immediately.  In a fraction of a second the entire star converts 50% of it's mass to energy.   No remnant, no black hole.  Enough energy is released to gravitationally unbind the entire star.

BOOM!   

You're probably right. Can you help me understand why the mathematics and redshift would not look the same were it a tele-nodal phenomenon rather than a transportation phenomenon?

I really hope you know what redshift is, and what a spectrometer does.

Basically, Edwin Hubble found that distance was proportional to redshift.  The further away something was, the more it was redshifted, and in a proportional manner.  Twice as far, twice as redshifted.  This effect is due the the expansion of the universe.

This means that as the photon was en route, the universe continued to expand and shift the photons spectra towards the red.  If the photon was entangled between two electrons across time, then why would the expansion of the universe matter?  And why produce specifically a redshift?  And why is it the same amount of redshift as the transportation model?  But if it actually had to traverse the distance, as the distance itself grew.....

[xphobe]

The gamma ray thing was just mentioned on this forum here. (marcus: ...In the modified theory not all light travels the same speed in vacuum. Very energetic gammaray photons are predicted to go just a wee bit faster.)

Hmm... that was in 2006.  I wonder what the GLAST survey found?

And here's a study from 2007 that says they may go a wee bit slower!
http://www.universetoday.com/2007/10/03/high-energy-gamma-rays-go-slower-than-the-speed-of-light/

Alternatively, whatever process produces extremely high energy gamma rays might actually make them slightly before or after the rest of them.

Interesting anyway.  If you find anything keep me posted!

[Immediacracy]

Well, it does seem that way, but study Relativity more and you'll see that there does seem to be a prohibition against information traveling faster-than-light regardless of the method.  No mater what you try, it doesn't work out.  Example:  While quantum entanglement works FTL, it can NOT transmit information FTL.

Maybe totally unrelated, but that suggests to me that FTL quantum entanglement might have to do with the information that maintains a particle's identity. It's how a proton knows how to continue to being a proton?

Once very, very first occurrence of pair-production begins, a runaway explosion occurs immediately.  In a fraction of a second the entire star converts 50% of it's mass to energy.   No remnant, no black hole.  Enough energy is released to gravitationally unbind the entire star.

BOOM!  

Wow, nice. Had not heard of that.

Basically, Edwin Hubble found that distance was proportional to redshift.  The further away something was, the more it was redshifted, and in a proportional manner.  Twice as far, twice as redshifted.  This effect is due the the expansion of the universe.

This means that as the photon was en route, the universe continued to expand and shift the photons spectra towards the red.  If the photon was entangled between two electrons across time, then why would the expansion of the universe matter?  And why produce specifically a redshift?  And why is it the same amount of redshift as the transportation model?  But if it actually had to traverse the distance, as the distance itself grew.....

It still seems possible to me that the redshift, or any distance related effect, could be a function of signal transmission and reception computations rather than continuous transportation through space. If you have a faint radio station, you lose some of the signal to static, and that's proportional to distance (and other terrestrial factors). I'm wondering if the red shift could represent a loss of quanta as a kind of timespace processing fee.

Quanta as postage stamps through the vacuum (or as postcards made of postage stamps) could be considered a kind of 'loneliness fatigue' as the probability of the signal finding the exact geometric path to a distant node drops proportionally (thinking more to time than distance - though they are the same thing). If I think of it that way it makes sense of my experience of light. It's instantaneous through space. If it takes time to get there, it's not because the vacuum slows it down with physical inertia, but because the longer light takes to go between nodes the more astronomical the vector-to-vector probability calculations have to be, and the more that long distance probability processing is evidenced in the integrity and content of the signal.



As the sphere of distances between any two material nodes in a vacuum grows, the light needs more time to 'search' for the next available node in range. As in the radio station example, the further the transmission origin, the more likely that some photon to photon signals will not be successful and the character of the ones who do will have something like a longer header of diminished quanta (red shift) which is transmitted even through the shorter network hops - it's recapitulated in every node to node jump.

I'm just using the radio station as a metaphor - not positing a significant detectable red shift on terrestrial radio signals or static as a quantum effect of the type I'm talking about.

Interesting stuff. I don't know how to devise a test to see whether the distance effects on energy in a vacuum are due to inertia through space or inertia during time, but if c makes them really the same thing, it seems like there could still be something there. Possibly it's this time drag which defines distance rather than the other way around. The universe as an event where physical position is a measure of ordered simultaneous electromagnetic phenomenon, and d= measure of probability (stabilized by c).

[none]

2. c is "an upper bound on the speed at which energy, matter, and information can travel[4]"

I recently noticed the size of the universe during the moments after the big bang was a greater distance than the speed of light constant would permit.

[Immediacracy]

I recently noticed the size of the universe during the moments after the big bang was a greater distance than the speed of light constant would permit.

Interesting. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there are variations in physical constants over time.

Maybe at a certain point after the big bang electromagnetism was upgraded to a more secure but slower addressing schema

[none]

it is just the size of the universe not the contents that expanded faster than liight is what I glean from the information on the subject of the size of the universe.

[Immediacracy]

The size of the universe independent from it's contents is a pretty abstract concept. Is this a mathematical definition of universe?

[Immediacracy]

I don't think it changes my premise but it suggests a more holographic nature of light, (rather than pixels which must be assembled into an images)

Scientists store whole image on a single photon (2007)

[Immediacracy]

I'm still thinking about this constantly and am trying to sort of bounce[1] it off of what I understand about sound.

Sound waves[2] require a material to propagate through, ok. So if you pluck a guitar string in a vacuum it vibrates, actually longer than if it was in air[3] because there's no air resistance so the only inertia to absorb the vibration comes from the guitar and the string.

So I'm trying to figure out, and I understand that I may be looking over some stupidly obvious thing here, if
1. normally guitar strings would cause the string next to it to vibrate
2. if so, to what degree

I'm assuming that if it does at all, that in a vacuum it would not and that the vibration can only be conducted through matter which is touching. Therefore
3. If you placed a microphone in a vacuum so that it's membrane or ribbon was actually touching the vibration source (or to a string that's touching the source), you would able to record that as sound, wouldn't you?

Just trying to compare light and sound to see if they are totally unrelated but for the wavelike aspect or if there's some deeper information to be gleaned from determining whether acoustic vibration is slower purely because there is mass involved and therefore travels at a fraction of c[4], or just because the audio phenomenon is orders of magnitude larger. Or both?

I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started thinking again about thunder and sound and how it relates to light's relativistic mass/momentum. In this case, the thunder is an effect of the atmosphere 'cooking' rapidly, not just from the photons, but I'm guessing also from the force of the electrons slamming into each other.

In my model of photons, the excited condition/energy our eyes recognized as 'light' jumps from particle to particle 'from the inside'. Electrons are activated individually and inspire identical activation in their neighboring atoms, which detect and respond to the neighbor's frisky (and information rich) display and is compelled to join in. (I think this may be the origin of the ancestor or elemental dynamic of subjectivity).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if photons were actually particles traveling through space, wouldn't turning on a flashlight look more like this?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X_7YRVGvtA[/youtube]

Lots of questions about perception. Does sound do to us what light does to us only more slowly and on a larger scope? Why is our perception of sound so different from light? Why can't we hear as precisely and confidently as we see.[5]. Why is our perception of heat so different than light? Why not have eyes detect into the thermal spectrum or have our skin have higher resolution tactile dimension.. it's all very strange and I've been thinking about it wayy too much.

Back to the thunder though...I see a parallel between the 'exteriorization' of the energy of lightning and the momentum and radiation pressure that cyberia mentioned. I'd be interested to know if photons have been observed having a momentum effect on a single atom. If so, then I think I'm wrong and there is an exterior particle effect, or else there is some mass generated by the inertia of the atom becoming physically excited.[6]

If we've only observed momentum effects in groups of atoms, then I think it could be more of a thunder reaction. The acoustic blast momentum comes from percussive collisions and hot particle-on-particle action of atomic and molecular masses and volumes...somehow it's three dimensional topology is being 'played' like a musical instrument - the intra-atomic energy of the photon is now amplified and expanded in scope to propagate inter-atomic conditions.

As a result of this transduction process, there is an emergent property of quality[7] - part analog/metaphor/expression echoing the initial energy, part departure from, reaction against, and emphatic realization (think thunder) of the interior quantum mechanic.

1.	pun intentional. sound bounce...reverb...never mind.
2.	shouldn't they be called audions or something instead?
3.	the thicker the string the longer the increase in duration (experiment pdf)
4.	and what aspects of audions being different from photons might be a result of that ratio...is that fraction actually...friction? (or fiction?)
5.	We don't say 'Stop, Hey, What's that light?'
6.	the Schwing principle
7.	maybe THE emergent property of quality?

[xphobe]

I don't think it changes my premise but it suggests a more holographic nature of light, (rather than pixels which must be assembled into an images)

Scientists store whole image on a single photon (2007)

That is very cool, but the headline is wrong.  If you follow the follow-up footnote link at the end of the story, it says that the image wasn't actually stored on a single photon.

So if they took the time to add the footnote, why didn't they just correct the headline?  This is a generalization, and probably off-topic here, but it seems to me that British media are more eager to sensationalize a story than their American counterparts.  The lines between tabloid and respected journal are fuzzier over there.

[Immediacracy]

That is very cool, but the headline is wrong.  If you follow the follow-up footnote link at the end of the story, it says that the image wasn't actually stored on a single photon.

So if they took the time to add the footnote, why didn't they just correct the headline?  This is a generalization, and probably off-topic here, but it seems to me that British media are more eager to sensationalize a story than their American counterparts.  The lines between tabloid and respected journal are fuzzier over there.

Ahh, you're right. Very devious (and/or incompetent) of them. It seemed fishy, although it does seem to me that light is holographic to some extent (as in an actual hologram). It may take "many photons together create the pattern" but I don't think those photons are assembled like pixels on a flat display, right? Optics seems to come out of whole pattern reflection/transmission/reception rather than a digital stream. Have to see if I can find some info about how the visual cortex processes that.

[Sleeping Shadow]

Immediacracy, your last post just helped me realize something. If photons was it's own individual thing traveling through space, then we'd always hear a sonic boom. Because thunder results from lightning breaking the sound barrier (moving faster than the speed of sound) in other word sonic boom. So if light was photons traveling through space, we'd always hear a sonic boom. But we don't, because they're not traveling through space!

[Immediacracy]

Immediacracy, your last post just helped me realize something. If photons was it's own individual thing traveling through space, then we'd always hear a sonic boom. Because thunder results from lightning breaking the sound barrier (moving faster than the speed of sound) in other word sonic boom. So if light was photons traveling through space, we'd always hear a sonic boom. But we don't, because they're not traveling through space!

I see what you're saying! Why doesn't something like sunrise make a sonic boom but lightning does? Why isn't it clapping electrons out of the way? Very nice. I was going to say 'well, wouldn't it have to be a photic boom made by FTL particles breaking the light barrier?', but yeah...why is sunrise absolutely silent? Obviously lightning is more than just photons, but still, the sun is a big ass light source...it should make some sound when it strikes the atmosphere to ground, no? 93 miles of momentum and no boom? hmm. Thanks for the great example...

Wish we could get some more academic people on here and try to somehow publish it as an internet collective or something.

[xphobe]

Check out Cerenkov radiation.  It's the blue glow given off by radioactive sources, typically seen in the pool of water-cooled nuclear reactors.  It's the photic analog of a sonic boom.  It is caused by charged particles traveling faster than the speed of light in a medium, slamming into that medium (in this case water, which has a slower value for c than vacuum does)

Photons don't interact with air molecules in the same way as particles with rest mass.  They can go through miles of air without hitting anything.  So I'm guessing they aren't very efficient at setting up a wave front in the air, which is what would be required for a sonic boom.

I have heard that some of the particle beam weapons being tested by the military do cause a sonic boom.

[Immediacracy]

Matter separated by only by the complete lack of itself is still the exact same matter. Maybe the seek time I'm thinking of is a measure of how long it takes for one particle to 'remember' when another particle was physically the same - uni-fied - ie, how long since the singularity (the Big Bang). We perceive that latency as distance as well as time.

This may be part of a kind of alchemical general relativity. Any part of a couple is still essentially part of a couple (pair, group, category, shared experience) even if they are existentially separated by time or space. There is an essential bond which doesn't physically exist but it carries the potential of existing. When pairs are reunited, they pick up where they left off when they were last together. Which may help explain why particle pairing effects. Somehow I think this is why, for example, gold is still gold even though it may be mixed in with other elements, etc.

I was thinking about glowing in general, and how, matter begins to become translucent when it's red hot. It glows from within, even after any outside source of energy is removed. It seems like any recipient of enough energy becomes a transmitter of energy and thus gains permeability (or loses rigidity), becomes softer. You can see it's insides. Energy is the blooming of matter, so to speak. Spacetime is kept by events and their rhythmic memories, not by waves propagating invisibly, intangibly through space.  

Maybe there aren't any waves at all, there are only holarchies of form separated from one another by their essential differences of scale, range, frequency, and orientation. Like a wave on the surface of the ocean, it's not a thing, it's the interference pattern between the atmosphere, the ocean, and the Earth. If photons were particles I would not expect hot coals to look like this:



but instead, maybe like branching tendrils of bright smoke or something...a grill crusted with holographic crystals or laser pitted like a DVD.

Ironically this worldview is, in some ways, the opposite of what I have been describing before. We are not living in a world of simulated experience. What we see is actually what there is to see and not imaginary personal qualia. Our experience of color still only exists for us locally but not because it's made up by the mind to describe the outside world's energy, it is a transduced analog of the outside world's events.

I was wrong to say that there is no light in the brain - the light that we see is the energy of the brain being lit up. We are the energy of the living brain, and when we open our eyes, we participate in the events of the outside world. Reality is exactly what it seems to be - if you look at your finger, what you're seeing is actually your finger (of course, it only makes sense through layers of optical and psychological memories about fingerness, but that's another story).

As for Cerenkov radiation, I'm thinking that it's not a a charged particle breaking c, it's c braking in the medium. Again, it's an effect of the excitation of the material, rather than something physically coming out of the material into your eye. It's your eye being able to see into the material (just like it seems). A glow is matter becoming temporarily transparent, from the inside out.

It gets weird. Does this mean that a mirror image is reversed because you are 'seeing what the mirror is seeing'? Trippy, but I think... it might.

[Immediacracy]

One more whimsical way of looking at this to add tonight.

The particle wave duality of the photon can be thought of this way. I'm thinking that the photon is neither a particle nor a wave and it doesn't move. The photon is like this:  

Two eyes denoting particle nature and the smile denoting wave nature. Photons 'smile' at each other and other photons 'smile' back when they 'see' the emotion expressed, they feel an analog of that emotion, and respond with a some degree of a reflection of that smile.

Maybe they have to 'close their eyes' when they smile and cannot smile with their eyes open, thus implicating Heisenberg Uncertainty...position or velocity, not both. Only there is no position, no velocity, no particle, no wave, just a 'smiling/looking'-'feeling/seeing' functionality which is propagated and experienced from within the interior of matter. This seems to be how we experience light, we see the outside world inside a private theater in our brain - not as a barrage of rays coming from everywhere. We look out on the illuminated world from inside ourselves, not submit to an irradiation of corneal phantasm.

Think of matter not as just islands of substance surrounded by space, but also a continuous experience separated by time. Everything that has occurred since the Big Bang singularity is the story of matter; while space is that story flattened out into three dimensions. Just as matter can move freely through space, perhaps light can look and remember freely through matter, through the ongoing singularity of that cosmic history which is shared by all somethingness, behind the back of spacetime's nothingness.

I swear that really does make sense to me, but I'm guessing it won't for most of you. Oh well, hope you enjoyed it anyways.

Edit: Added some.

[MockTurtle]

I see what you're saying! Why doesn't something like sunrise make a sonic boom but lightning does?

Sonic booms are created by pressure waves in air that can't get out of the way
of the object fast enough. To get pressure waves, you need to push air out of the way

Photons are very small, have no mass (or nearly no mass), and have no electric charge.

When they go through air, they don't push particles out of the way... they often miss them entirely.
Even when they do hit them, these particles have almost no momentum, so they can't push big Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules out of the way. With no molecules getting pushed, you have not
pressure waves and no boom.

-- edited --
This is a simplification based on photons acting like particles.  Really they are wave-particle packets
and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Also, there is a very tiny bit of momentum, but on the scale
necessary for sonic booms, it's insignificant.

[Sleeping Shadow]

Mock, d'you believe photons travels through space?


Does science even have an official position on this right now or is it up to opinion because it isn't known for sure?

[Immediacracy]

Photons are very small, have no mass (or nearly no mass), and have no electric charge.

To me, I'm having a hard time believing in these very small (like as small the space that an electron jiggles?), massless, inertialess, chargless photons which can't seem to do much of anything to anything except be theoretically associated with changes which show up at actual particles at a distance. Can anyone say that they have detected evidence of a photon independently of an effect on another particle that has mass? Aren't all our observations inferred or deduced rather than direct? Is there no ordinary, commonsense natural example on a human scale which would even remotely suggest a particle nature of light? Even one?

What is a particle? Pretty much it's a little crumb of some physical substance, a tiny object which behaves in a manner consistent with classical physics. Subject to gravity. It takes them time to go from one place to another, during which you can see them in motion. They push other particles out of the way or at least change their angular momentum. The 'photon' satisfies none of those. It is a particle in name only.

I fully recognize that I could be completely wrong about this, but the more I look, the more I am feeling that quantum physics is an empty box filled with ever multiplying theories about undetectable, meaningless phenomena. Though perfectly accurate and useful in predicting results, I think that it's only a matter of time before a massive overhaul is demanded of QM, from the very basics of it's assumptions. Of course you won't hear many scientists tell you that. Maybe they're right? Give it another 50 years and see...

You don't have to agree with me, and I expect that, but doesn't the whole thing seem just the tiniest bit "Emperors New Clothes" to any of you? Invisible, intangible, massless, faster than anything else... umm. ok. I'm not saying throw out the math and the observations, I'm just asking what if we run them all again using this fundamental axiom which relocates quantum activity within matter rather than through the spaces between it?

Instead of the Two Slit Experiment proving some crazy particle-but-wave-but-neither property of 'photons', we see a specific laser excitation source event produced by electronic technological. We have a dark metal obstruction with a shape that allows two separate views of the laser event. We have a projection screen. We have an observer - doesn't matter if it's a camera lens and film, ccd and tape, cornea and retina...all matter which is tuned to our range of visual sensitivity.

Maybe what we see with our focused eyes through our focused camera lens, is not a wave interference pattern projected around the slit partition, but rather a blur made to appear stationary due to the observers focus. What we see may actually be the photologically active physical particles of the material of the screen 'looking back and forth" at their view of the laser event through both slits. Presented with different views - the phenomena 'spreads out' to a wide horizontal range, maybe alternating electric and magnetic push/pull to have a better chance of including as much information about the holographic nature of the laser, the plate, and the slits. The observer, in that experiment as the reader of this post, makes a decision. Their eye determines how the screen looks. Do they trust the invisible math, or do they trust 'their own lying eyes'?  

[MockTurtle]

Is there no ordinary, commonsense natural example on a human scale which would even remotely suggest a particle nature of light? Even one?

That is what Einstein won his Nobel prize for.

What is a particle? Pretty much it's a little crumb of some physical substance, a tiny object which behaves in a manner consistent with classical physics. Subject to gravity. It takes them time to go from one place to another, during which you can see them in motion. They push other particles out of the way or at least change their angular momentum. The 'photon' satisfies none of those. It is a particle in name only.

Photon's push particles out of the way.  That is how solar cells work--they knock electrons of the cell.

While no one is ruling out other models of how the universe works, the one thing this particular
model has going for it is that it lets us make predictions that are phenomenally accurate.  We
can calculate properties of elements and molecules we have never seen, and have predicted
countless other effects that were later experimentally confirmed.  Until some other model does a
better job, assuming this one is correct is the safest course of action.

[Immediacracy]

Photon's push particles out of the way.  That is how solar cells work--they knock electrons of the cell.

How would we know the difference if the electrons jump off the cell themselves when that material illuminates?

While no one is ruling out other models of how the universe works, the one thing this particular
model has going for it is that it lets us make predictions that are phenomenally accurate.  We
can calculate properties of elements and molecules we have never seen, and have predicted
countless other effects that were later experimentally confirmed.  Until some other model does a
better job, assuming this one is correct is the safest course of action.

In my model, all those calculations should be the same, plus Uncertainty and Observer principle are likely explained.

[MockTurtle]

How would we know the difference if the electrons jump off the cell themselves when that material illuminates?

Einstein predicted the behavior based on his assumptions of particle like behavior, and his prediction was confirmed.  How does your model make more or better predictions?

In my model, all those calculations should be the same, plus Uncertainty and Observer principle are likely explained.

It's easy to come up with possibilities. If your model explains something QM does not, write it up
and submit it for publication.  You don't need a physics degree to get published, and the peer review
process can be very helpful.

[Immediacracy]

Einstein predicted the behavior based on his assumptions of particle like behavior, and his prediction was confirmed.  How does your model make more or better predictions?

Particle assumptions work for exterior mechanics (even though there's no exterior particles), and would be perfectly adequate were it not for one thing. The observer. Us. I think that my model predicts or at least explains subjective consciousness.

It's like if you wanted to examine the behavior of traffic and meticulously mapped out how green signals cause traffic to move while red stop - you might conceive the frequency of the signal/flow as having wave properties which can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy, and you might make equally excellent predictions based on observations of rotating tires, but unless you understand the subjective view of the driver, you can't really come close to getting a complete apprehension of the system as a whole.

It's easy to come up with possibilities. If your model explains something QM does not, write it up
and submit it for publication.  You don't need a physics degree to get published, and the peer review
process can be very helpful.

I've already started to put out feelers to possibly do something like that. Since it goes completely against fundamental assumptions of contemporary science, I'm not surprised to find strong opposition even at this early stage. I'm looking for a partner who has the formal skills to explicate it. It doesn't really matter - if nobody wants to listen, that's fine too. These things usually take a generation to be overturned. Maybe I'll publish it as a comedy instead. Mainly I'm interested in the cosmological implications for non-scientists.