Each photon deflects the other into itself, then it deflects itself continuously.
That's not the behavior of a soliton wave, which would refract, reflect or adsorb. It sounds more like some virtual particle (if you want to start here with the "either-or particle-wave state", as artifact of detection).
If so, i do think you are on the right visual atd track with the twisted Mobius figure, but space will be filled more efficiently (which is precisely what any wave is trying to do), if you go with something like an iterating Lissajous schematic, as others have done before. -s
. The photon features displacement current wherein " -farsight
Bit of a leap from "deflection" to "displacement current".
seasmith wrote: It sounds more like some virtual particle (if you want to start here with the "either-or particle-wave state", as artifact of detection).
The photon is definitely real, and it definitely has a wave nature. -farsight
Yes, but you are "deflecting" it, like a 'particle.
seasmith wrote: If so, i do think you are on the right visual atd track with the twisted Mobius figure, but space will be filled more efficiently (which is precisely what any wave is trying to do), if you go with something like an iterating Lissajous schematic, as others have done before.
Look at the black line in the torus above. That's your Lissajous schematic -farsight.
i was just suggesting a minor tweak to your visual aid ; as a Mobius strip is stationary, while an iterating Lissajous is moving in the nature of waves. Even so-called "standing waves".
Bengt Nyman
Re: The Photon
jjohnson wrote: Hi, Bengt, Jim
Hi Jim, I believe that a photon is much too complex to be described as just frequency, mass and a constant propagation velocity. I expect us to find that light traveling through different parts of the universe travels at slightly different speeds. This speed ratio, which is the inverse of the index of refraction, is likely to vary depending on the density of energy that the photon travels through. For glass of optical quality this ratio is approximately 1-1/3=0.67. I wouldn't be surprised if dense parts of our universe slows the passage of a photon to a velocity of 1-1/10^16 or less. Numerical claims aside I believe that we are limiting our thinking by assuming a constancy which is mathematically convenient but realistically unlikely.
Farsight
Re: The Photon
Noted seasmith. Yes, standing waves aren't motionless. If you have a standing wave in a box and you open it, it's off like a shot from a standing start because it always was moving at c. Electron/positron annihilation is like opening one box with another, only afterwards there's no boxes left because each was a "photon in a box of its own making".
Good stuff Bengt. The speed of light varies with gravitational potential. That's why light clocks go slower when they're lower. And why we have gravitational lensing. See this paper:
jjohnson wrote: Hi, Bengt, If there are occasional photon collisions - actual physical collisions, with an exchange of energy and momentum, the law of conservation of momentum say that if one of the photons is red-shifted as it departs the collision site, the other one should be blue-shifted. Jim
Imagine the photon like a toroid, layered like an onion, with a toroidal closed loop standing wave the frequency of infrared light in the outer layer and an ultraviolet frequency in the inner layer. The center of the toroid propagates with the velocity c/n where n is the local refractive index of the surrounding in-homogeneous vacuum. The outer periphery of this photoid is essentially motionless while the center erupts forward propelling the photon forward with the speed of c/n. Because of the complexity and the dynamics of these nested, closed loop, standing waves it is not immediately obvious what a collision would bring. It appears from slit and polarizing experiments that a photon is a highly motivated, resilient and somewhat self healing constellation. Take for example the so called three polarizer paradox which in this light is no paradox; Let us say that polarizer 1 is arranged to pass waves in a vertical plane. However, the energy found past polarizer 1 is 50% of the original, teaching us that toroidal recirculation planes all the way up to 45 degrees to some extent manages their way through the polarizer. Polarizer 2 is designed to pass waves at a 45 degree angle. There should be little or none of that but the energy past polarizer 2 is still an impressive 25%. This indicates that even if only a single toroidal recirculation plane is capable of passing through, it also manages to pull nearby recirculation planes along, like a toroidal slinky. Polarizer 3 is designed to pass waves only in a horizontal plane and polarizer 1 should have made sure that there is none of that. However, polarizer 2 has shifted the pattern somewhat toward 45 degrees allowing a few recirculation planes to find their way through the horizontal polarizer. The amount of energy passing the third polarizer is 12.5%. The moral of the story is that a photon is one crafty son of a toroidal slinky.
We should be able to get some ideas about the effects of a photon to photon collision by studying colliding smoke rings which propagate in a manner similar to the proposed photoid. Whether these collisions can be viewed in simple mechanical terms as 100% elastic, creating redshift in one and blueshift in the other, I do not know. One alternative is that a collision might be more plastic, knocking down certain recirculation energies from one level to another, possibly spinning of some dark energy in form of one or several free, elementary energy strings.
It is high time to give up the use of the w o r d "photon", and of a bad concept which will shortly be a century old. Radiation does not consist of particles, and the classical, i.e., n o n - q u a n t u m , limit of Q T R is described by Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic fields, which do not involve particles.
Interesting paper, Gary. I agree with it. The "photon" is just a wave with a quantum nature. It isn't some billiard ball thing. And neither is the electron. IMHO a lot of the problems in contemporary physics stem from people thinking in terms of point-particles rather than waves.
Bengt Nyman
Re: The Photon
If we accept the thought that the subparticulate world might be far richer and more detailed than previously imagined, it is easier to envision the suggestion that what we call a particle, a photon or an electron, is actually a living, closed loop of recirculating standing waves nested together in a temporarily stable and harmonic quantum of electrodynamic energy. This ball of energy may vary in design and size giving rise to the family of "particles" that we today have come to accept as building blocks of our Electric Universe. Some of these constellations appear to be more restless than others, such as the photon, whose electromagnetic weave and inherent recirculation dynamics relies on reaching for new space in a constant state of motion until reflected, deconstructed or absorbed in an exchange with other energy constellations. I suspect that the electron is of a smaller but somewhat similar design, a sibling to the photon with an ancestral propensity for restlessness. Considering how far science has come in the last thousand years, I am looking forward to another thousand years of interesting work and discoveries in the subatomic world.
Farsight
Re: The Photon
I suspect the electron is just a 511keV photon stuck in a tight double loop, Bengt. It's a standing wave because in aggregate it isn't going anywhere.
And that other particles with mass are variations on that theme. Interestingly, when it comes to massive particles, leaving antiparticles out of it, guess how many are stable?
Two.
Chromium6
Re: The Photon
Found this interesting on the photon. Still another item to consider:
Ionization and photon emission in single-bubble sonoluminescence
We calculate the emitted light spectrum using a blackbody radiation model refined in two ways to accommodate the effects of ionization. First, the presence of ionized plasma greatly reduces the photon mean free path, and hence we divide the bubble into a strongly absorbing core and a weakly absorbing outershell, according to the wavelength-dependent mean free path. We define the radius of the "black" core to be the point where (l) equals a fraction of the bubble radius. The core surface temperature is increased because photons emitted in the inner core are absorbed by the surface layer of the core. We treat this effect approximately by redistributing the radiation energy of the inner core to the gas in the surface layer.
Gas bubbles in liquids can emit bursts of light called sonoluminescence when they are 'popped' by ultrasound. Weizhong Chen and co-workers at Nanjing University1 have developed a new way of monitoring the wavelengths emitted in sonoluminescence, revealing the extreme conditions inside the bubble.
During sonoluminescence, the gas inside a collapsing bubble reaches pressures and temperatures so high that it ionizes to produce light. This has led to speculation that sonoluminescence could be used to achieve thermonuclear fusion, but the process is still poorly understood.
Chen and co-workers directed ultrasound onto bubbles of krypton gas dissolved in sulphuric acid. The emitted light was recorded on a spectrograph, then delivered to a streak camera, which deflects light to trace wavelengths over time. The streak images showed that the wavelength decreased from infrared to ultraviolet during the sonoluminescence pulse, which lasted around nine nanoseconds.
According to the laws of black-body radiation, the wavelength trend corresponds to an exponential increase in temperatures as high as 100,000 kelvins. However, this does not take into account the high pressures in the bubble, which could produce much higher peak temperatures on the scale of millions of kelvins.
The researchers were unable to record images fast enough to observe the cooling process. It remains a mystery exactly how the bubbles are able to cool down so rapidly.
"According to the laws of black-body radiation, the wavelength trend corresponds to an exponential increase in temperatures as high as 100,000 kelvins. However, this does not take into account the high pressures in the bubble, which could produce much higher peak temperatures on the scale of millions of kelvins.
The researchers were unable to record images fast enough to observe the cooling process. It remains a mystery exactly how the bubbles are able to cool down so rapidly. -
-Chromium6
Here's an instance where photo-optic 'phase' does correlate with a physical 'phase' change. When infrared "black-body" heat radiation transforms to ultraviolet light radiation, it is no longer black-body emission, by definition. It is light. Simultaneously with that phase shft, the temperature (detected) displays a scale transform as well.
In the case of sonoluminescence, it's heat's close physical cousin sound, which shifts the "exponential" nuclear response of the gas in the cavities. I suppose one could say that "pressure" is relative.
A reverse analog might be the action of light on 'dyes' ?
