EM photons travel at the speed of light, c, from the moment of their creation, to the moment of their extinction. From the perspective of a photon, time does not pass. You could even say that to a photon, time does not exist. So there is nothing to distinguish the photon's creation from its extinction, or any other point along its path.
From the perspective of a light photon, it exists at all points along its path simultaneously as well as the creation and extinction being indistinguishable. In fact, the concept of "simultaneity" has no meaning from the perspective of a photon.
It rather hurts to think about.
These thoughts came from thinking about how curved space makes a photon curve. The images of a sheet warped in three dimensions showing the path of a photon, has never been clear to me, because it is warped in a their dimension which is not realistic. I wish they would simply draw it as a plane. But then the lines bend toward the large mass and back out again, not showing the path of any object of photon.
BTW, anyone know why Bosons do not have antiparticles? I didn't realize that until now.
On a sunny day (Wed, 5 Oct 2022 07:01:19 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Ricky snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
A guy named Albert E. came up with 'photon' At that time many objected to his idea. 'photon' is just a mathematical construct.
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Albert E.'s theory is just a mathematical construct HE PROVIDES NO MECHANISM. It is as bad as epicycles were before they _admitted_ earth and other planets orbited the sun. In MY view LOl, and since it seems to have been shown that gravity propagates at the speed of light, the Le Sage theory provides a MECHANISM
*This is important, because electrickety without electrons makes no sense starting at explaining the vacuum diode
So I think (well hehe) that EM radiation may just be a state of the Le Sage particle. If you think all that through you can see and actually predict a lot of nature. Maybe some generations are needed to get rid of the Albert E. parroting epicycles kwantuumers. In a PMT we cry 'photon detected' when an electron is kicked lose from an atom and then hits the dynode causing to emit more and more at every dynode. But it is, if you look at the electron in orbit around an atom, like a ball on a wire connected to a pole in the water, We cry 'electron' at the point where so much energy is applied by the waves that the wire breaks But the water molecules are orders of magnitude smaller... and have their own laws.. in the same way Le Sage type particles are real particles like water molecules. Einstein was a failure uniting graffiti :-) with the other forces of nature and caused idiot adventures and his songs are almost a dogma worse than the church and earth at the center.
So... Maybe I am wrong, but then again we aliens are not supposed to help OK forget it.
For observations: If Le Sage particles exist and originate in processes in stars then the universe will push itself apart (seems to be the case); If Le Sage particles exist then heavenly bodies should heat up (see Pluto for example). If Le Sage particles exist then there is a maximum to gravity (all particles intercepted) and the black hole singularity crap is solved. If Le Sage particles are a carrier of EM radiation then gravity moves at the speed of light (seems to have been confirmed). Forget all the crap about jumping in the future by going faster etc... Mamaticians always like to do a divide by zero and like to work with equations that are an incomplete description of reality and then sell their crap as the ultimate truth,, String theory comes to mind. If Le Sage particle exist you will see that the pendulum moves slower where there are less (because intercepted by some object like on the earth surface), and matter is less compressed, the pendulum becomes longer, 'time is slower in a gravity well' this is observed There are many more things that can be explained that way It is relatively simple to make predictions from Le Sage theory and do some experiments to verify those.
So I stick to that Le Sage mechanism until I see something better 'if there is something better,' Without a mechanism advancement is dead. Like Albert E. is!
There's a selection rule, in spectroscopy, that requires photon interaction with matter to add or take away ONE unit of angular momentum. If 'a photon' were just an abstraction, that rule would make no sense; you could dump an arbitrary amount of spin into the electromagnetic field.
Or, you could get a zero-angular-momentum excitation of an electron.
But, that doesn't happen. The EM field has to be quantized into spinny bits or the whole of atomic physics has to be reformulated somehow. Mechanism is exactly what the photon IS, in all our experiments with light quanta; it isn't lacking, it's called 'photon'.
You don't need to get that specialized to show photons of light must exist. But the Jan Man is never going to accept any of it. He's been seasoning his mushrooms with Le Sage and marjoram. Hmmm... that's making me hungry.
The irony is that while Jan Man is negging on Einstein for his paper on the photo-electric effect, that is actually what earned a Nobel prize for, in spite of his work on relativity. It's especially ironic that Jan Man is complaining that Einstein didn't need to conjure up an artificial mechanism, such as the æther or Le Sage spices.
On a sunny day (Wed, 5 Oct 2022 18:09:25 -0700 (PDT)) it happened whit3rd snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
If EM waves are a state of Le Sage particles then always there is interaction with matter. That idea predicts it from basics. But at a much finer (smaller) level. The quantization is at the size of Le Sage particles. Photon is just related to electron charge. Even Planck pointed out that we should not take his constant as a basic thing.
The HOLE of atomic fishsicks is what job creation at CERN is all about. God particle, theory of everything, every few years a new song. Nothing really useful to show for it. Einstein was a failure
parrotting ..... no end .... understanding? You humming beans.. so silly
Max Planck was pretty cautious when he first spelled out the idea. He didn't bother to send Einsteins paper out for peer review when he got it, which suggests that he quite liked the paper.
Not exactly.
The last time physics got really useful it gave us atomic bombs. The Josephson junction eventually gave us a really stable voltage reference.
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CERN doesn't look like being that useful any time soon, but I'm comfortable with that. Jan Panteltje's grasp of what might be useful is illustrated by his enthusiasm for the Le Sage theory of gravity.
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In not finding the theory of everything? The rest of us are less ambitious.
Jan Panteltje parrots a lot of stuff he doesn't understand. If he were human, he might be silly. As it is, he's just irrelevant.
It is quite possible though that the photon wave duality that we teach at university now is just a weak field limiting version of a more complete and complicated theory that we just haven't found yet.
That is a theory as far beyond what we have now as present quantum theory is above the original Rutherford-Bohr quantisation model and the empirical Rydberg formulae that their model was first able to explain.
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Breakthroughs in theoretical physics tend to occur with novel mathematics - string theory held promise for a while but I suspect Clifford algebras and Conway's spinors may eventually win the day.
Only time will tell - it will be obvious once someone makes the next breakthrough that it will all make more sense (at least to physicists).
Quantisation of energy vs time is a bit funny though.
They are a conjugate pair in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle just like with position and momentum.
I always found it a bit odd thinking about photons (dish to dish correlations) at radio frequencies. The mathematics is identical to visible light but to have a well defined frequency you *must* have a certain number of wavelengths in your photon wave packet. The lengths of narrowband photons do get a bit silly at 1m (30MHz) wavelength.
After all we could choose the receiver bandwidth at reception time but each photon was emitted from the source billions of years ago. I came to the conclusion that thinking about photons in the RF band was unhelpful.
The tension between a specific defined frequency of photon and the extent of the wavetrain in spacetime to support it remains though.
Ultra-short laser pulses now have FWHM of around 0.5THz.
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And they are getting ever shorter with cunning mode-locked laser designs. I presume one of the thing JL's company facilitate.
The problem stems from the idea of a photon as a particle that travels from a source to a detector. That leads to all sorts of weird ideas and paradoxes. All these problems vanish if you think of a photon as an interaction between matter and waves. Such interactions are naturally quantized because *matter* is quantized. Waves, or more generally fields, need not be.
Of course, we have no way to directly observe the continuity of waves, because all our detectors rely on interactions with matter.
Fence post error in my mental arithmetic - I usually observed in the radar bands between 2.7GHz and 31GHz.
Most impressive image I ever made was VLA Cass A epoch 1984 at 5GHz (6cm). It was the longest observing time spent on a single object. (there is now a movie of it expanding of which that is the first frame)
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I don't like the official stock image though - too soot and whitewash for my taste it has lost all the intricate nebulosity inside. The raw image was originally made at 2048 square which was right at the limits of what was possible on the AIPS hardware at the time.
On a sunny day (Fri, 7 Oct 2022 11:02:32 +0100) it happened Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <thotfq$lku$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>:
The trick we used was to operate the VLA slightly out of band to observe at 4 frequencies with an average of 5GHz but scaled so that we pushed the imaging field to be 4x bigger than the instrument was designed for. Oversampling 4x moves the diffraction rings out by the same factor. The correlator gain settings were interesting too it is rather bright.
The movie seems to have gone. I suspect the person who maintained it may have moved into Xrays and I can't see it anywhere online now. They were also involved in the Chandra 3D modelling of Cass A. I'm surprised that it is no longer online - I expected them to add another frame every ~5 years for as long as the VLA was still operational at that frequency.
My ancient page about my part in those observations is online here:
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But the link to the movie link now points at thin air. The wayback machine has only one snapshot which failed "Not found" :(
I might have a personal copy of it in my old archives but it will take some finding as I can't remember what the filename is called. I will ask the person who used to maintain it and cross fingers for a reply.
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