Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Interesting (?) idea on the nature of light

Workaround - 11-3-2015 at 16:08

Hello everyone,
I have been lurking around this forum for quite some time but never had anything I thought worth communicating

I did however recently run into this and remembered another post related to the subject which I can't dig up at the moment (and yes I tried google and TFSE):

http://www.nobeliefs.com/light.htm

While I do not pretend to fully understand quantum theory or relativity I found the above article inspiring if only for attempting to shake such a fundamental human perception.

Thoughts?

aga - 11-3-2015 at 16:23

Light exists, or i would not be able to read your post.

What light Is, well, that is another matter, or wave, or both, or something else entirely.

The way i see Reality, it's a bit like most people watching a Film at the cinema.

The audience all look at the Screen, and are immersed in the Film, and Believe that Reality.

I'm that bastard that keeps getting up, walking around and taking a look at all of the stuff, trying the fire doors, staring at the projector window, and generally being a nuisance.

If i had any sense, i'd do that while selling ice cream or something, but hey.

Loptr - 11-3-2015 at 16:25

Wait, this sounds familiar.

Let me find a post about similar quantum thought exercises....

Zombie - 11-3-2015 at 16:28

I'm gonna make a pot of coffee, and read that article.

Topics like this amaze me because most people will argue "Theory" until they run out of breath.

What I have learned in 57 years is most things are WAY less complex than we think. We introduce complexity. Nature does not.

I think that is a great first post.


Quote: Originally posted by Loptr  
Wait, this sounds familiar.

Let me find a post about similar quantum thought exercises....



The split personality kid that posted... One of the first threads I posted in here if the date helps.

[Edited on 3-12-2015 by Zombie]

Loptr - 11-3-2015 at 18:33

Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  

Quote: Originally posted by Loptr  
Wait, this sounds familiar.

Let me find a post about similar quantum thought exercises....



The split personality kid that posted... One of the first threads I posted in here if the date helps.

[Edited on 3-12-2015 by Zombie]


Yeah, found it going through your posts. Good 'ol joebloggs.

Zombie, you have a lot of freakin posts, man! ;)

I retract my initial comment. This doesn't sound like him, so never mind me.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 11-3-2015 at 19:23

Snipped some sections of of the article to get at what appears to be the main gist of things.
Quote:
Can we actually know anything about sole photons? Perhaps, even in principle, there occurs a quantum barrier to forever prevent knowledge of them. Or perhaps there exists nothing for us to know about; maybe light does not exist at all between emission and detection! ... If light does not exist between events, how does an electron event influence another electron? ... The implications appear staggering, and I do not pretend to have an answer. It certainly does not conform to common sense.

It really, really doesn't does it?
Quote:
To this day, there has never existed a single scientific evidential experiment that has shown the existence of a wave or a particle of light between emission and detection.


Brainstorming time here, what things exactly can we measure without detection?

The polarizing filters bit is pretty funny too.

Zombie - 11-3-2015 at 19:40

Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu  


Brainstorming time here, what things exactly can we measure without detection?



Pretty much everything. We apply known properties to anything, and mathematically arrive at an answer.

The properties of light are assumptions for the most part. yet math does not prove any of them.
Perhaps the author is on to something when he stated this may remain an unknown.

Rather than listing the measurable items, maybe we should list the things that are assumed yet unproven.

I'll bet you a doughnut that there is a common thread in there that has been missed.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 12-3-2015 at 03:28

Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu  


Brainstorming time here, what things exactly can we measure without detection?



Pretty much everything. We apply known properties to anything, and mathematically arrive at an answer.

This is not measurement. This is calculation based on previous measurements.

"To this day, there has never existed a single scientific evidential experiment that has shown the existence of a baseball between emission and detection." Hypothesis: what if a "baseball" is really just discrete teleportation of mass through delayed time?

morganbw - 12-3-2015 at 03:30

Quote: Originally posted by aga  
Light exists, or i would not be able to read your post.

What light Is, well, that is another matter, or wave, or both, or something else entirely.



It really can be this simple

IrC - 12-3-2015 at 04:40

"light does not exist between events, but only at the events"

The experiments to detect the aether yielded nothing which gave rise to the belief it does not exist. Not surprising since higher dimensions than that which comprise the realm of existence in the 'physical reality' we term spacetime are thus far undetectable with our known physical instrumentality. As far as I know no one has physically detected the fabric of space either yet we say it is expanding, being swept out as the universe expands.

One must give serious consideration to the subject of dimensions if one is going to arrive at any greater understanding. In some theories such as string ten is the number chosen to define dimensions and one could consider that time is not actually a dimension, one could even consider time does not exist. If time is given the attributes of a dimension one could consider the fact that it would not support higher 'physical' dimensions, i.e., everything would have collapsed to zero before the universe could have come into existence. Instead of giving time the property of dimension it could be a property of the fields comprising physical reality, matter possessing mass. If you were a photon for you time does not exist implying if you have no mass, for you there is no time.

The concept of 'nothing' I consider to be an infinitely accelerating negative implosion which I consider as a dimension I will label as zero. To me this is not the same thing as empty space within the universe, which is in effect the 'fabric of spacetime'. Put simply my 'dimension zero' is that which is outside the entire universe whereas empty space inside the universe is this 'aether' (spacetime) which expands with the expansion of the universe. Could this negative implosion ('dimension zero') be perceived in its interaction upon all other dimensions as the effect we term negative energy and being greater outside the universe than inside the result is an accelerating expansion. The field around mass being like a shock-wave in the negative implosion slightly reducing the rate of implosion. Any reduction of the rate of implosion being something which exists as opposed to nothing existing at all which is this implosion.

I believe the 11 dimensions of M theory is logical, and I believe M theory is the best model of reality yet devised. One could imagine that electric and magnetic forces are nothing more than properties of the fabric of spacetime arising from stresses upon that fabric. One could deduce that a photon is merely a vibration in that fabric, vibrating multi-dimensionally. Easy to see why a photon would appear to not exist between emission and detection for it is a vibration in the 'aether' which so far has been undetectable. Of course I consider this aether to actually be the 'fabric of spacetime'. But this in no way can be construed to mean in between emission and detection it does not exist. What it means to me is so far science is not advanced enough to prove it does or does not exist.

Considering these forces as arising from periodic or non-periodic stresses in the multidimensional fabric of spacetime aid in understanding virtual particles, Dirac's sea, Hawking radiation, in general how it is particles can 'pop' into existence from 'nothing'. In reality it is not nothing, rather merely something which has so far been undetectable. The 'aether' if you will. When the vibration in the aether (photon) reaches a particle it imparts its momentum to it. The vibration stresses the spacetime the particle exists in and this 'multidimensional deformation' is seen as energy the particle receives. Another aspect to consider, the greater spacetime is deformed (curved) the greater is the force we perceive as gravity. All things in creation could be considered to be mechanical yet not perceived as such due to the aspects of higher dimensions which must be included in an understanding of all things.

If all photons of identical energy are identical to each other and a large number of them were emitted from a star a billion light years away one would have plenty of them to eliminate by detecting anywhere along the path from said star to the earth. No matter where along the path one stopped some by detection one would still detect them as existing, meaning anywhere along the entire billion light years of distance they do exist. Just as a many radios spread out in a line from a broadcast all would receive that signal (although at slightly different times) each radio detecting some of the photons all coming from the same antenna. The point I am making is anywhere along the path of the emitted photons they can be detected meaning anywhere along said path they must exist therefore they do exist.

careysub - 12-3-2015 at 05:57

For some years spanning the 1970s and 1980s I regularly subscribed to a publication called the "Braheian Debater" published by DOTGU: Defenders of the Geocentric Universe.

This group (who were at pains to point out that they were NOT "flat earthers") argued that the geocentric model of the Universe had never been properly disproven and that perfectly viable geocentric models still existed.

I found this quite entertaining, since they were taking a valid philosophical position, after a fashion, and trying to defend it with an attempt at serious argumentation. It was wildly, farcically wrong of course - but I was impressed by the seriousness of the attempt. It actually got some circulation in the physics department of the university I was attending some of those years, for much the same reason I think.

Was the apparent sincerity real, or was this an elaborate pre-Internet prank, along the lines of the Illuminatus stuff and the cult of "Bob"? I don't know, but it made me wonder.

The site mentioned here is much less an impressive effort (though I do not question its sincerity), since its philosophical basis (denying that we understand all of reality though observable phenomena) would have made even the geocentrist scientists of prior millenia snicker. Ptolemy, who constructed the geocentric model that lasted 1400 years in 130 AD had a far better understanding of scientific principles than this website.

Zombie - 12-3-2015 at 08:09

This is the point that interests me the most.

Bring up a theory, and it becomes the target of attack rather than a basis for discussion.
You can take any example you like. If it is based on theory, and there is no PROOF as to qualify what you are stating... why or how can someone argue that they are correct, and you are wrong.

Take light as a vibration in space. the force that created the vibration can, and should continue just like one of those pendulum / ball things.
I can also understand a force similar to gravity / electrical, atomic, molecular attraction creating, and maintaining the wave length.

The exact dynamics do not really matter at this point. Understanding what is happening is the important part here.

If something can be seen or measured is not of any concern. Determining what is happening is.

I also believe that once this mechanism is understood it will open all the locked doors we have.
Things like tele-portation, levitation, free energy... Medical advances. Climate control.

Sorry for drifting but it is more important to say what something CAN be rather than what something Can Not be.

If we do not know... we can not argue we are correct.

Loptr - 12-3-2015 at 08:55

Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
This is the point that interests me the most.

Bring up a theory, and it becomes the target of attack rather than a basis for discussion.
You can take any example you like. If it is based on theory, and there is no PROOF as to qualify what you are stating... why or how can someone argue that they are correct, and you are wrong.

Take light as a vibration in space. the force that created the vibration can, and should continue just like one of those pendulum / ball things.
I can also understand a force similar to gravity / electrical, atomic, molecular attraction creating, and maintaining the wave length.

The exact dynamics do not really matter at this point. Understanding what is happening is the important part here.

If something can be seen or measured is not of any concern. Determining what is happening is.

I also believe that once this mechanism is understood it will open all the locked doors we have.
Things like tele-portation, levitation, free energy... Medical advances. Climate control.

Sorry for drifting but it is more important to say what something CAN be rather than what something Can Not be.

If we do not know... we can not argue we are correct.


This has been helpful for me in watching myself during arguments.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

Fulmen - 12-3-2015 at 09:23

"To this day, there has never existed a single scientific evidential experiment that has shown the existence of a wave or a particle of light between emission and detection"
Well, DUH! How does one prove the existence of something without detection? This applies to everything.

Technically it is correct, but what does he hope to achieve? How does this help us understand reality?

Dr.Bob - 12-3-2015 at 09:37

The key to useful science is can you determine something to exist to the degree of certainly that allows you to use the knowledge for useful work. So whether or not light exists at every point is an unprovable debate akin to the angles dancing on a pin. But I can predict that if I flip a switch I can see at night, and that is useful. It is like arguing over live in other galaxies, even if there were life there, during the time it took for any proof of them to get here, they would have likely killed themselves off, much like humans are trying to do constantly. So even if there are aliens in another galaxy, it has no useful bearing on life on earth, at least to me. But we do know what the moon is like, and the trips there produced many useful technologies that we use daily. So I try to spend my time working towards problems that have solutions and that might affect my daily living.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 12-3-2015 at 09:49

Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
"To this day, there has never existed a single scientific evidential experiment that has shown the existence of a wave or a particle of light between emission and detection"
Well, DUH! How does one prove the existence of something without detection? This applies to everything.

Technically it is correct, but what does he hope to achieve? How does this help us understand reality?

Because it allows for mass teleportation and precognition, obviously. If I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, you don't detect it until it hits you, and I don't detect it from the moment it leaves my hand. Neither of us has any way to prove the baseball existed in the space between you and me. Therefore, doesn't it make more sense to think of the baseball not as something that actually travels, but as mass teleportation from the atoms in my hand to the atoms in your head, delayed through time? It's so much less complicated!

And the best part is, if I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, then Zombie steps into the trajectory, it will miraculously hit him instead, even though at the moment I threw the baseball the mass teleportation should have been programmed for your position. Matter can predict future events, man! It all makes so much sense! Just wait until we figure out how to harness it!

(The photon argument makes exactly this much sense.)

Fulmen - 12-3-2015 at 09:53

Exactly. We cannot know for sure if light (or anything else for that matter) exists in any meaningful or "real" sense when not observed. We can however observe that light behaves as if it exists at all times.

Now I'll admit I only gave it a quick glance, has anyone read the whole thing? If so, did he make any useful predictions or suggest an experiment to confirm his hypothesis?

While I have rejected this off-hand, I'll admit that it all boils down to the results. If you can use this model and produce the same result as we observe then it is just as valid as the current models. The interpretations might seem bonkers to us, but in science the proof of the pudding is always in the eating.

[Edited on 12-3-15 by Fulmen]

Zombie - 12-3-2015 at 10:10

Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu  
Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
"To this day, there has never existed a single scientific evidential experiment that has shown the existence of a wave or a particle of light between emission and detection"
Well, DUH! How does one prove the existence of something without detection? This applies to everything.

Technically it is correct, but what does he hope to achieve? How does this help us understand reality?

Because it allows for mass teleportation and precognition, obviously. If I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, you don't detect it until it hits you, and I don't detect it from the moment it leaves my hand. Neither of us has any way to prove the baseball existed in the space between you and me. Therefore, doesn't it make more sense to think of the baseball not as something that actually travels, but as mass teleportation from the atoms in my hand to the atoms in your head, delayed through time? It's so much less complicated!

And the best part is, if I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, then Zombie steps into the trajectory, it will miraculously hit him instead, even though at the moment I threw the baseball the mass teleportation should have been programmed for your position. Matter can predict future events, man! It all makes so much sense! Just wait until we figure out how to harness it!

(The photon argument makes exactly this much sense.)



Wouldn't you be surprised if the ball went thru me? Who's to say whether I was there or not.

The room is black, right.?

I love your analogy but in this case it does not apply.
A particle of light is non detectable. The base ball is.

As a matter of fact you can hear a baseball coming.

That's my point. People tend to "Goof" about something they can not understand.

I don't understand light but I allow for ANY option to be viable.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 12-3-2015 at 11:00

Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu  
Quote: Originally posted by Fulmen  
"To this day, there has never existed a single scientific evidential experiment that has shown the existence of a wave or a particle of light between emission and detection"
Well, DUH! How does one prove the existence of something without detection? This applies to everything.

Technically it is correct, but what does he hope to achieve? How does this help us understand reality?

Because it allows for mass teleportation and precognition, obviously. If I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, you don't detect it until it hits you, and I don't detect it from the moment it leaves my hand. Neither of us has any way to prove the baseball existed in the space between you and me. Therefore, doesn't it make more sense to think of the baseball not as something that actually travels, but as mass teleportation from the atoms in my hand to the atoms in your head, delayed through time? It's so much less complicated!

And the best part is, if I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, then Zombie steps into the trajectory, it will miraculously hit him instead, even though at the moment I threw the baseball the mass teleportation should have been programmed for your position. Matter can predict future events, man! It all makes so much sense! Just wait until we figure out how to harness it!

(The photon argument makes exactly this much sense.)



Wouldn't you be surprised if the ball went thru me? Who's to say whether I was there or not.

The room is black, right.?

I love your analogy but in this case it does not apply.
A particle of light is non detectable. The base ball is.

As a matter of fact you can hear a baseball coming.

That's my point. People tend to "Goof" about something they can not understand.

I don't understand light but I allow for ANY option to be viable.

A "particle" of light is detectable. This is how you see. This is how light becomes involved in chemical reactions. This is why when you stand out in the sun you feel heat. That's the point.

You won't hear nor feel a baseball coming in a vacuum-filled room, which is why I stipulated such. Just because you can't detect something until impact does not make the most likely option that it teleported through time and space.

Pointing out you can interfere with the "teleporting" baseball shows that precognition is implied on the part of the baseball. The thing is, this is a direct analogy. You can interfere with light in the same way. It doesn't reflect from what you aimed it at, it reflects from whatever was in the way at the time it arrived at that point. So, under this model, light somehow knows the future. Tell me that somehow makes more sense than a traveling particle.

[Edited on 3-12-2015 by Etaoin Shrdlu]

aga - 12-3-2015 at 12:42

Light has no brain like ours, so 'knows' nothing in any sense we could understand.

As far as it's Future, and Past are concerned, it has already been there, and will be again.

The fact that our own cognition of events depends on Time (our minds are Nailed to Time) blinds us to the other possible realities.

An observed particle could be bouncing about in all dimensions, including Time in insane ways, yet we only observe it when it co-ordinates with our perceptual window of time.

My maths are sadly too feeble to come up with any models or proofs, yet i feel can imagine that there is no more than 1 particle making up the entirety of whatever there is, oscillating wildly in all dimensions at once.

To explain my ramblings: a 'particle' (some stuff) exists as an expression of the relative proportions of the dimensions X, Y, Z, Mass, Electrical, Gravitic, Magnetic and Time that it occupies. Energy being the total of it's occupancy of said dimensions.

Shove in some electromagnetic energy (heat) and it Displaces some of it's dimentional occupancy into other dimensions, such as X, Y, Z and Time : it vibrates, an electron 'excites' etc.

Extrapolate to the nth degree, and it's all just 1 particle going apeshit.

We see it as a coherent Universe as our minds are stuck on 1 linear Time Track, so at each point in the Time dimension that we can observe, said particle zips about in the X, Y, Z etc, creating the Universal illusion.

These are just my random thoughts with absolutely no grounding in science.

PHILOU Zrealone - 12-3-2015 at 12:59

Some thought to help further debate :D

Why Light is so light...and why black-holes are so heavy...
Two opposite parts of the same reality and problem?

Zombie - 12-3-2015 at 13:19

"It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do".
Einstein



[/rquote]
A "particle" of light is detectable. This is how you see. This is how light becomes involved in chemical reactions. This is why when you stand out in the sun you feel heat. That's the point.
[Edited on 3-12-2015 by Etaoin Shrdlu][/rquote]




I never said light or anything else "tele-ports".
I did say that IF we understood the physics of light, then perhaps we could understand other 'barriers in our technologies, and our way of looking at things..

If you mean a Photon is a light particle then I have to read more. As I understand it a Photon is imagined to be the core energy of many things.

Yet the definition of a photon still does not explain the mechanics of light.

It's the mechanics that intrest me, and I believe that is the crux of the thread. Not whether or not light exists or can tele-port thru zombies. :D



[Edited on 3-12-2015 by Zombie]

Etaoin Shrdlu - 12-3-2015 at 13:30

Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
I never said light or anything else "tele-ports".

No, but the article does, which was the crux of my argument against it. You said that argument was a bad analogy. I disagreed based on the article. Seemed rational. :D

Fulmen - 12-3-2015 at 13:32

aga is right about one thing: Time is part of this. As far as I can tell nobody has a good working model of time yet. And with it being tied to the speed of light itself, things get tricky. The way I understand it it sounds like we're measuring time by self referencing time. It's like measuring the speed of the hands on a clock using the same clock as a time reference. In such a case the second hand will ALWAYS turn 360° in 60 seconds. Basically it looks like both time and speed are part of something more fundamental.

What that is I don't know, and from what I can gather from "nerd popular science" nobody else knows either. If I'm lucky they DO know more and I need to brush up on my reading ;)

But physics on this level is complex, I'm not sure one can get a layman's grasp of it. I think I have a decent grasp of the gist of General Relativity, and I accept that Quantum Physics is real but too weird for me. But beyond that I'm pretty clueless. A part of me wants to believe that this means that there IS more "down there", something more profound and elegant. That I will see a new Einstein og Newton that completely revolutionizes physics. But I also see the hubris in assuming that reality should be comprehensible to my feeble mind.

[Edited on 12-3-15 by Fulmen]

Zombie - 12-3-2015 at 13:34

Sorry. I did not catch that.

Oddly I did bring up tele-portation as a potential use for the mechanics of light tho...

I might have PMS. sorry.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 12-3-2015 at 13:40

No worries, I mistake people's arguments all the time.

Fulmen - 12-3-2015 at 13:49

BTW Zombie: The contradictions that Einstein talks of in your post are tied to the mental models. The mathematical models are exact, but the way we translates them into mental models that fit into our senses and view of reality can be fairly flexible. Any mental models that produce the same math are equally valid, they are simply complimentary views. Take light being described as both a particle and a wave. But that doesn't mean it's a wave like we see on the ocean or a particle like a shiny marble. It's not meant THAT literal. It's just that it can be described mathematically in the same way you would describe a simple particle or wave. And concepts that are fundamentally incompatible in our macroscopic world might not be that on a more fundamental level. This makes the mental models imperfect, but as long as they use the same math you can't really tell which one is "right".

Chemosynthesis - 12-3-2015 at 13:52

Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu  

Because it allows for mass teleportation and precognition, obviously. [....] And the best part is, if I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, then Zombie steps into the trajectory, it will miraculously hit him instead, even though at the moment I threw the baseball the mass teleportation should have been programmed for your position. Matter can predict future events, man! It all makes so much sense! Just wait until we figure out how to harness it!

(The photon argument makes exactly this much sense.)



Wouldn't you be surprised if the ball went thru me? Who's to say whether I was there or not.

This is exactly my problem with some concepts of electron tunneling. There is potentially a big problem with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in truly determining that an electron tunneled through an energy barrier when certainty of measurement of electron position and velocity (thus direction) at any one point are negatively correlated. How certain are you really of the barrier's 'height' or the electron's position at any one point in time?

Zombie - 12-3-2015 at 14:01

That's my point.
To whatever light really is, the mechanism, I might not be in the path. There are many forms of energy that simply do not "see us".

Light is obviously not one of these forms but perhaps the mechanism that carries light is.

That opens the door to either the light mechanism (carrier /energy) is blocked by an abject or the matter of light itself is.

In either case (blocked) it implies matter.
Or if it is not blocked completely then it must be energy, and the swinging ball / pendulum effect could be part of it.

Or as Mr. Aga suggests there could be so many more planes of existence involved that the answer is literally swimming away from sight.

[Edited on 3-12-2015 by Zombie]

aga - 12-3-2015 at 14:40

Quote: Originally posted by PHILOU Zrealone  
Why Light is so light...and why black-holes are so heavy...
Two opposite parts of the same reality and problem?

Neither are.

Light is a perceived lack of Mass, as the particle is expressing more in the X Y or Z as a function of the Time than in the Gravitic.

Slow it down (contain it's XYZ nd Time expression possibilities somehow) and it will demonstrate more in the Gravitic, Electric or Magnetic : it has no other option, no other way to continue to exist with it's current energy.

With the 1 super-excited particle model, you'd have already altered it's state, seeing as you formed the apparatus (from it) to cause the containment, thereby pre-ordaining the 'containment'.

This is the stuff that sends you mad.

Beer is the only antidote.

aga - 12-3-2015 at 14:49

As an aside, with No 'particle' discovering a dimension in which to express, that particular dimension simple does not exist.

Matter does not exist in a space-time 'framework' where things can Be in a linearly Time fixed reality.

They are one in the same thing : What stuff needs describes a dimension in which to Be, and in that dimension, it Is.

Etaoin Shrdlu - 12-3-2015 at 16:48

Quote: Originally posted by Chemosynthesis  
Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
Quote: Originally posted by Etaoin Shrdlu  

Because it allows for mass teleportation and precognition, obviously. [....] And the best part is, if I throw a baseball at you in a pitch black vacuum-filled room, then Zombie steps into the trajectory, it will miraculously hit him instead, even though at the moment I threw the baseball the mass teleportation should have been programmed for your position. Matter can predict future events, man! It all makes so much sense! Just wait until we figure out how to harness it!

(The photon argument makes exactly this much sense.)



Wouldn't you be surprised if the ball went thru me? Who's to say whether I was there or not.

This is exactly my problem with some concepts of electron tunneling. There is potentially a big problem with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in truly determining that an electron tunneled through an energy barrier when certainty of measurement of electron position and velocity (thus direction) at any one point are negatively correlated. How certain are you really of the barrier's 'height' or the electron's position at any one point in time?

A lot less sure than I am of the position of macroscale objects, certainly. Isn't that why electron tunneling happens, because on the quantum scale, probabilistic effects become relevant? (Disclaimer: I know nearly nothing about electron tunneling.)
Quote: Originally posted by Zombie  
That opens the door to either the light mechanism (carrier /energy) is blocked by an abject or the matter of light itself is.

In either case (blocked) it implies matter.
Or if it is not blocked completely then it must be energy, and the swinging ball / pendulum effect could be part of it.

Proposing a light carrier strays well away from the premise of the article though, leaving us with the original problem of whether light is "carried" by a wave or a particle. From what I can tell, the hypothesis is that it's carried by neither, simply jumps from one atom to another with no intermediate.

I truly don't understand the "what if Zombie's not really in the way" question. In the case of trying to block a light beam, if you put an object in the way the light hits that object, if you don't do that it doesn't hit that object. Assuming that "light" is long-distance, time-delayed teleportation of energy with no actual existence between objects, this assumes foreknowledge in that transferred energy (or in the objects) of how the universe is going to look in half a microsecond, ten seconds, one light year, however long it takes to "travel."

Maybe there's a moment where the light/baseball tunnels through him, but I'm really only interested in the many, many cases where it doesn't, because those are the cases where the article's proposal falls apart.

Another point against this idea is the fact that light paths are bent by gravity. How does one affect something midway that doesn't exist except at its origin and destination?

Zombie - 12-3-2015 at 17:51

I agree 100% that you can not influence something that does not exist, (in theory or practice).

The proposal that light "jumps for one atom to the next" in my opinion is a fair statement. (pendulum / ball thing). It could follow that the particle that is blocked, is so active that it acts like a ricocheting bullet.
We all see the effect. A person hit with a focused light will reflect some, absorb some, and disburse some. Remove the person, and the room is again well lit.

Sooo take smoke into the equation.
You can see the beam of light from source to target. Is there REALLY a mass of particles or is it a residual effect. Is the smoke now holding left over energy?

Lasers... Another monkey wrench. Are they emitting a mass of focused particles or are they applying / reflecting energy en-mass to the air molecules.

It's an interesting topic for sure.
You can make arguments for all aspects.

Fire a laser beam at 90* from the head of a stream of light...
Will that laser beam travel in a straight line, curve, become a "wall of light?

This goes back to the application of time. In reality I believe time is the only unit of measure.
It takes a specific amount of time to add 10 kilos of sugar to a scale.
It takes time to measure a distance.
It takes time for a sound wave to be measured.

So apply what we know of time to light emissions. As was already stated we don't know enough about either to relate to anything reasonable (by our standards).

It's a cool topic.

[Edited on 3-13-2015 by Zombie]

neptunium - 12-3-2015 at 19:36

according to Einstein mass deform space in which light travel . gravity does not bent light per say , rather light follow the contour of space being bent by the presence of matter.
just as black holes bent spacetime to a point so stretched nothing can escape ! not even spacetime itself (Kip Thorne Black Holes and time wraps 1994)
I see a few silly questions or i did not understand his point..i`ll read it again when i have a minute.

On the nature of light itself i agree it is quite perplexing and much is still not fully understood ... much like what is matter made of ? what are quarks made of ? and of course what is time ? beyond fascinating questions indeed !

[Edited on 13-3-2015 by neptunium]