A Question about Light
I found this image somewhere on the web, and it symbolizes for me all that I do not understand in modern science. And by understanding I mean in fact the inability to accept, even if can follow the explanations given.
I consider this image as an ontological puzzle because it explains the transition from one form to the other as a photon. The simplest explanation that I can come up with in my blessed ignorance is that something created or caused that photon to appear and went on further its merry way.
Apparently that is too simple. We are told to believe that that something (electron + positron), got completely annihilated and turned into a photon (light?), to then rise again from is ashes like a magical phoenix , and take its original form once again (electron + positron).
I am sure others will be delighted to explain to me how such a magical happening is the most rational event one can conceive.
I will be listening very carefully.
I consider this image as an ontological puzzle because it explains the transition from one form to the other as a photon. The simplest explanation that I can come up with in my blessed ignorance is that something created or caused that photon to appear and went on further its merry way.
Apparently that is too simple. We are told to believe that that something (electron + positron), got completely annihilated and turned into a photon (light?), to then rise again from is ashes like a magical phoenix , and take its original form once again (electron + positron).
I am sure others will be delighted to explain to me how such a magical happening is the most rational event one can conceive.
I will be listening very carefully.
Comments (53)
"it explains the transition from one form to the same form as a photon.
Asking why the world isn't like your own personal imagination of how things should rationally be is backwards if you're trying to explore science.
Start by asking why your imagination of what is rational is different than the way things actually are, not why you might be mysteriously right from the apriori get-go. The world is the way the world is regardless of how you want or believe or imagine it is or ought to be.
Like your wailings regarding light, I could kick up an intuitive fuss about existence itself and say: "How is it 'rational' that something should exist rather than nothing? Physicists will have to explain their magical assumption that something exists or else admit that their theories of existence are unfounded"
Do you see the problem with the above Hachem? It's painfully obvious that things exist, just like it's painfully obvious that the contemporary and scientific models describing light mechanics reflect reality. We know our theories are quite accurate because of all the accurate predictions and technological applications we can create out of them (the science works in ways that go unfathomably far beyond your own crude attempts to describe light, making them superior in every conceivable way).
Electrons generate photons; they just do, and it's a brute observed fact of the world we live in. An electron can emit a photon if it loses energy (where the photon will have a total energy equal to the energy lost by the electron). We don't know the "why" of photon generation, we just observe that it happens (like existence itself) and try to understand the "what" of it.
You will surely find this unsatisfying, and this does get into the more speculative and hypothetical end of our physical models, but one answer to particle creation/annihilation AND the existence of something from nothing is the idea that for every particle that gets created of X energy, an anti particle of -X energy is simultaneously created. Why do electrons create photons? Because they have to; it's the way they are. If they wern't that way, we wouldn't be around to ask these questions; it's what's required for things to exist in this plain...
Why is it we live in a world where the laws of energy conservation are unbreakable? At what point of ad nauseam demonstration that you cannot break energy conservation laws will you accept that this is the case? Consider, for instance, your concept of how light fills a surrounding dark space and how objects are viewed at a distance. Do you realize that the farther away we get from the light source that the less and less light energy actually strikes us (light gets more diffused; if it didn't then the laws of energy conservation would be broken and we could create free energy/perpetual motion machines).
Physics isn't about sitting around, hypothesizing how we think things are or should be, and arguing from intuition why we're correct. Physics is about surrendering to evidence. Quantum mechanics was never appealing to anyone (except maybe Heisenberg, but nobody can say why) and it's filled with utterly uninuitive and borderline stupid sounding nonsense that makes most people (especially physicists) recoil in disgust at just how ludicrous and unintuitive it sounds. AND YET THEY ACCEPT IT DUE TO THE OVERWHELMING PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE. If you want to understand quantum mechanics, you've got to create new intuitive models, new visualizations, and you've got to forget about all the unproven physical assumptions you have previously operated on.
The field of quantum physics is indeed on the hunt for a new and revolutionary way of understanding, describing, and otherwise conceptualizing the behavior of quantum material, but it's got to actually be better than the "place-holder" observation based descriptions which are currently the best we can do. We don't fully understand electrons and we definitely don't understand why electrons behave in the way that we definitively observe them behaving, but we have experimental evidence to demonstrate that those behaviors are descriptively and predictively accurate.
Nothing you've suggested or offered provides insight or predictive power into the why of physics, and most of what you've suggested has long been scientifically falsified (that light transmission is instantaneous for example).
So... If you want to provide a replacement model, it must actually explain the results of the experiments we conduct and offer us greater predictive power over them rather than in fact being falsified by the results and offering no insight or predictive power whatsoever.
Asking questions about your lack of understanding is one thing, but framing it like an open challenge to refute the supposedly robust bushel of semi-decipherable nonsense you beat around and allude is the way things are, is another thing entirely. The moment you begin accusing people who are earnestly trying to explain the science (that you so evidently don't fully understand) as being intellectually dishonest (or whatever), it comes off like the most naively arrogant, pretentious, and exhausting thing we can imagine: here is someone asking random slews of questions with complex answers who then shits on everyone who cannot satisfy him with an answer while actually assuming that he knows more than every PhD holding physicist on the planet (even while he claims not to).
Don't be that guy Hachem. Start by educating yourself as formally as you can. Here is a series of lectures called "physics for future presidents" which covers pretty much all of the topics you have questions about. It will give you reasonable access to accurate enough conceptual tools to understand light, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics as portrayed by the contemporary scientific consensus. Please watch it:
https://cosmolearning.org/video-lectures/atoms-heat/
The above link will start you on the first lecture. Watch them all. I would recommend this series of lectures for any would be philosopher actually.
you mean you don't know the answer?
The diagram looks incorrect to me as it does not follow the law of conservation of charge.
The arrows indicate the direction through time.
1 + 1 does not equal -1 + -1
It looks much like image formation: one side is the inverse image of the other.
Then the first electron is travelling backwards in time. The diagram still doesn't make sense.
How would a correct diagram look like according to you?
I don't know what that means.
Sorry, it was another poster who made a thread about light and reflection, but looking back over their thread they were more into the cognitive aspect whereas you're challenging the physics of it.
That was Feynman's van. Wasn't sure if everyone knows that.
okay.
Who published that diagram? The English is not good. It says "a electron", then "an new electron".
it's on a need to know basis. And we don't need to know. :)
Here is a sensible approach. Do lots of reading and study and see if you can work out what it is that they are talking about.
Here is another sensible approach. Trust the people who have done lots of reading and study and seem to know what they are talking about.
Here is a silly approach. Ask lots of questions about what you see in front of you, as if the physicists had obviously got it all wrong.
Ha @Banno, you are really endearing in your naiveté. It is not a matter of understanding, but a matter of being convinced. I hope you will not give up your efforts in explaining to me how you think the diagram, however you interpret it, depicts a rational theory.
Have you looked at this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram
That would be the starting point for this discussion.
One para of interest:
Feynman used Ernst Stueckelberg's interpretation of the positron as if it were an electron moving backward in time. Thus, antiparticles are represented as moving backward along the time axis in Feynman diagrams.
You can't expect to look at a formalism and have it be obvious. People (including @Seagull) should study this Wiki page as a starting point for beginning to understand what this is about. You can't just go, oh 1 + 1 isn't 1 - 1 as if you have a Ph.D. in quantum physics but you don't even know how to read the diagram.
It's like at the end of Good Will Hunting XD!
I put it in the question category while at the same time wanting to emphasize it does not concern a philosophical mystery (at least that's the developing consensus).
I wonder, if the forum accepts posts from crackpots, what the result will be. Will it attract more crackpots? I don't think so; I suspect that they will not like each other's company. So there may be an advantage to the community in keeping one or two "pet" crackpots around the premises...
THe trick will be to keep them in the right place - the science threads are not the right place.
Science is always a matter of consensus. There is no greater authority than the scientific community to decide at any period whether a view should be taken seriously.
But a forum community is not a science community. Their consensus is irrelevant. Unless you want to protect young minds from pernicious ideas, a forum should be the place where ideas and opinions clash.
The protection of what it means to be "scientific" is according to me the biggest sign of weakness a community can show.
Science does not need to be protected from crackpots. There were the results speak for themselves a scientist can simply refer to them.
Of course, very often, results are colored by the theory that distinguishes them from the plethora of other data. It becomes then a matter and of discussion and of further empirical research.
The intensity with which people think that they have to protect science is unscientific and frightening. It is a danger to progress because it raises generations in awe of what science has already achieved and encourages orthodoxy there where only controversial ideas may contribute to progress.
I see that you have not only transfered the thread, but also changed the title without my permission. I find the former to be your prerogative, but not the latter.
Light is still a mystery for science, and Einstein was the first to acknowledge it.
Objection noted.
I would propose to move all my threads in Philosophy of Science to the Questions section.
Maybe then a rational discussion will be possible.
edit: but please do not change anything to the titles or the text!
Ok. I'll do that anon.
would be so kind then as to restore the original title of this thread?
Not sure all these discussions should be in the Question category actually. Need a little time on this one.
A search of his famous Treatise on the term "light" yields, besides irrelevant homonyms, one single conclusion: Maxwell never considered light as anything else but a by-product of electricity. One can read his comments on glow, spark and electrical images and be easily convinced.
In fact, speaking of electrical images (chapter VII), he takes the optical phenomenon as the basis to try and explain electrical images:
"100.] The idea of an image is most easily acquired by considering the optical phenomena on account of which the term image was first introduced into science."
Another interesting moment is par.149 ff where he speaks of light phenomena as observed through a spectrometer. His conclusion is certainly worth quoting:
"... neither the electric fluid, if there be such a substance, nor any etherial medium such as is supposed to pervade all ordinary matter is rendered luminous during the discharge, for if it were so its spectrum would be visible in all discharges."
The spectrometer shows him beyond doubt that the different lines one witnesses when analyzing light from different substances that they cannot come from anything else besides the substances themselves.
In other words, no light without matter, since neither the "electric fluid" nor the the "etherial medium" - Maxwell still believes in the ether- can be rendered luminous.
This short analysis shows that my conception of light as a local phenomenon created by the collision of e.m waves and matter is certainly compatible with Maxwell's own analysis.
Are you familiar with Newton's work on light? He did a lot of experimentation with prisms, mirrors, etc., and wrote an extensive speculative treatise on the nature of light, I believe it's in his "Optics", "The Queries". It's been a long time since I read it, but I believe he concluded that light is a particle, but it's a very odd sort of particle, like an inverted particle. Massive, material particles would undergo an inversion within the sun, to become light particles. I believe he provided the basis for the modern "point particle". In any case, his speculations were displaced by wave theories, and only since the twentieth century with the development of quantum physics, have they become more relevant.
yes, the title is in old English "Opticks". What is your point if I may ask?
I want to know if you've read this material, and what is your opinion of it.
Yes, I have read it. And, if you have read this thread, you will know that I do not agree with it. It considers light not as a local phenomenon, but as an independent one. The difference with Huygens being that he indeed considers it as made of corpuscles. I have to add that Newton was very circumspect and never really showed his hand, hiding behind his non fingo hypotheses and preferring to concentrate on the description of what he saw. It was more his followers that really took a stand, encouraged by Newton's lack of endorsement of Huygens analysis.
Matter, in fact, generates EM waves (notably excited electrons). When something glows red hot for instance, it's electrons are bouncing back and forth so quickly that they actually generate photons (making them "glow"). I believe you can accept the above, and also that Roomer did essentially calculate the approximate finite speed of light (even if you think he didn't really prove it, so long as you can accept that the speed of light is finite then we can move on).
So, light interacting with matter. Yes. Let's talk about the quantum and Newtonian scale of the scientific models:
On the quantum scale, a single excited or energetic electron might generate a photon which goes flying off in whichever direction. This single photon can be thought of as a wave-particle in that it has a particular wavelength as it travels (a probabilistic super-position), but will inevitably end up with a single realized position should it encounter an obstacle. The energy that the electron lost in generating the photon will determine it's wavelength, thus maintaining the conservation of energy laws. If this single photon strikes an atom, the electrons in the atomic structure may either absorb some or all of the photon's energy (causing them to store the energy as excitement/heat), and then they reflect the remainder (technically the photon is annihilated and a new weaker one is created). Whether or not a photon will be absorbed or reflected (and by how much) when it encounters an electron depends on the potential energy values of the atomic structure that the electron is contained in, which is why different objects reflect different wavelengths and quantities of light. The wavelength of a given photon determines whether or not the various detectors in our eyes (the red, green,and blue ones) will be able to sense them, and depending on the mix of various quantities of differently colored photons entering our eyes, we therefore see different colors.
So, on the Newtonian scale, let's start by considering normal sunlight (generally white light). It's more or less an equal mix of red, green, and blue wavelength photons, and when a bunch of them enter our eyes at once we perceive the color white. White objects reflect RGB wavelength photons equally which is what makes them "white".
Now consider white light striking a green object: the surface of the "green" object is absorbing all or most of the photons striking it (causing it to heat up a bit) except for the green wavelength photons. The only photons which green objects do not absorb and instead reflect are green ones!
White is a color, but black is more accurately conceived as the absence of color. Black is what an object looks like when it absorbs most or all of the photons which strike it, and in a sense is what we see when very few photons enter our eyes from a particular direction. Notably the fact that black surfaces absorb most of the light which strikes them is why they heat up more quickly than other surfaces (and is also why white or highly reflective material like Mylar heats up the slowest due to electromagnetic radiation).
So imagine a world where light has a finite speed rather than some other mysterious nature as depicted in your captain/telescope + sailor below example. As we get farther away from a light source (a source of reflected light or a direct source) the photons that strike us become fewer and fewer because they tend to constantly spread out from one another the further they travel. This means that fewer photons from a given source will pass through a given aperture pointed toward that source the farther away it gets (think how the skin of a balloon becomes thinner the more it is stretched out as it's diameter increases).
Using the ship on the horizon example, the fact that the human eye is a smaller aperture means that it can collect fewer photons from a given source than the larger aperture of the telescope. The fact that sheer resolution issues will affect the human eye before a telescope is a function of their relative size.
Being unable to distinguish a ship on the horizon doesn't mean "you're seeing the ship as it is now rather the light which is reflected from it with some time delay", it just means that the human eye is in that case too small to catch enough photons from the ship to distinguish and recognize any meaningful details.
P.S: Have you begun watching the physics series I recommended?
In other words, exactly what about your conception of light is incompatible with the conception of modern physics?
Whatever the universe is, however it got started, the first thing to know about it is that there is light.
I have no idea what light is. Does anyone?
I wonder why you are back. Hadn't you decided that enough is enough?
Well, I fell the same way. Good day to you.
While most of the other posters have decided that there's no point seriously conversing with you, I don't recall making any such decision.
I did inform you near the outset of our interactions that I'm probably going to be the only one patient or stupid enough (or some combination of both) to actually sustain prolonged discourse with you given the nature of your suggestions. And since my assumption seems to have been accurate, why not just attempt to rebut my criticisms? If you don't at least attempt to have legitimate discourse (if not with me, then with who?) then I'm afraid the endless torrent of obscure threads you create will only illicit occasional ridicule rather than interesting dialogue that might actually be worth writing or reading.
I find your presumptions about the behavior of light to be deeply malformed and demonstrably false (example: the captain-sailor analogy where telescopes magically access photons which have not yet reached them). Your criticism of Romer's experiment depends on an explanation of how parallax or resolution might actually affect his results which you have not provided, nor have you offered an alternative model that could actually predict future deviations in eclipse duration such as the accurate predictions we can make when we use the model of finite light speed. The pinhole experiments you have conducted are interesting on the surface, but it's quick and easy to discover that Airy disk patterns are well understood to result from focusing a laser through a small aperture or lens. This photo is the result from shining a red laser through a 0.1 mm aperture. According to Wikiedia, a 0.25mm aperture and three extension rings sound like the conditions required to create the Airy pattern.
If the unintuitive nature of quantum mechanics upsets you, and that is actually the root and fundamental gripe driving the creation of these threads, then there can be no consolation; quantum mechanics unfortunately is what it unfortunately is.
But it seems like all of your threads form a path which wraps around a tangled and impenetrable bush that represents your own personal vision of how light really works. If you could clearly communicate that vision so It could be addressed rather than trying to challenge the existing theories with fringe objections (as if to prepare us all for the eventual true replacement that you provide us with) that would save you from having to create a crap ton of threads.
Please, I beg you, tell me again how it is you just know that telescopes break the laws of thermodynamics by accessing photons which have not yet reached them?
You may say "good day" and ignore me, but that will probably only encourage others to read my posts which are so very critical of your own. If you want to persuade anyone then you need to address my points directly as I have addressed yours. If you want to actually have your misconceptions corrected like you repeatedly claim, then likewise, you need to confront my explanations directly.
And no, I did not announce that enough is enough. You must be confusing me with literally every other poster. And so here you are, barking and biting at the only hand repeatedly attempting to feed you...
Why?
The intensity with which you are trying to destroy my credibility reeks of hate and despair. Those emotions should be completely absent of a discussion about scientific issues.
If you think I am a crackpot, as you have explicitly and oftentimes not so subtly, made clear, then there is only one rational attitude you should adopt.
Ignore me.
Unless of course you think that you should protect the world, science and this forum from my pernicious ideas.
In such a case, your crusade would be understandable and your zeal would do you honor.
As it is, I fear that I have lost any bit of respect for you as intellectuals and consider continuing a sterile dialogue utterly senseless.
Do yourself a favor and go play somewhere else. There is nothing you could say that could entice me to reply to your attacks.