Well, this is s.e.d. and I'm a humble circuit designer. All I can do is describe em radiation in whatever terms that let me build things that work. I don't have to have a deep understanding of quantum mechanics. But then, probably nobody has a deep understanding of quantum mechanics.
To some extent, not going too deep into the theory makes it easier to accept quantum paradoxes. A beam-splitter interferometer will warp your head if you think about it too much.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
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That's strange because I was taught from first science in grade school, all the way up to college that a photon was an entity of its own and got created by an electron or electrons changing their orbit position or charge levels in a step motion, which then give birth to a photon and propel it out of the atom. And the opposite when an photon got introduced to an atom.
Of course science back then and those who instructed it are looked at as being neanderthal. Or, maybe we haven't really gotten that far ?
Actually, I have a current quantum paradox. I'm making a pulse generator that will drive an e/o modulator, to chop out short packets of light in a circulating laser sort of thing. If we make the light gate too short, the wavelength inherently broadens and bad optical stuff happens. Of course, it's hard to understand why that would happen if light is made of photons. It's all very confusing, but since I can only make about 40 ps edges, it works to my advantage; if the customer wanted 10 ps pulses, he'd buy the electronics from someone else.
I should get the first stuffed board next week. This fast stuff is always tricky. We did a bunch of em simulation just to get the pcb footprint of the edge-launch SMAs right. I hope we got it right.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
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The last time I checked, QM was created for solving problems or describing mysteries to solve for an answer when they don't really understand how it works. It sounds good, confuses the hell out of the audience (intended approach) and then, leaves the one using QM in their talks, in a world of maze. Because now, they are hoping that every one in the crowd bought into it and no one notices.
They ( whoever they are ) literally say you don't understand it, you just get used to it. Somewhere about your sophomore year in the physics curriculum, you can tell the people who are going on with it. In your junior year, they remain and you ( I did, anyway ) move on.
if you're *really* unlucky, you don't find that out until you finish a PhD...
Dualisms are lousy storytelling, but frequently good explanations. Feynman was a modestly* successful physicist but an awesome story teller, so....
It certainly does if you think of light as discrete countable photons. But if you think of it as a wave phenomenon that will dislodge electrons in a photodetector with a probability proportional to the local power density, and crucially, that such events act back on the field, it looks much more comprehensible.
Sure, just give up all the ideas about time and causality and the speed of light that you ever had.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
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Try reading the Lamb article. It's pretty illuminating. Or look at some of the discussions of this point in sci.optics, e.g.
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Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Not all. The Einstein argument that superluminal propagation violates causality is still right, so you don't have to worry about folks with time machines showing up on your doorstep.
It's true that QM involves apparently uncaused events, and in fact there are some fairly deep arguments (that I don't understand) to support the idea that this isn't just a result of our ignorance. The appearance of new information in the universe on a huge scale, combined with the existence of powerful amplifiers of randomness, puts very sharp limits on our ability to predict the future, even with arbitrarily accurate initial measurements.
As a Christian, this worries me not at all, but it's certainly a problem for mechanists like Dawkins, Sagan, and Einstein.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
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Well, no, on the contrary, keep those. It's rather the mystic babble about 'quantum teleportation', 'entanglement', single photons following multiple distinct trajectories, etc., that fly in the face of those ideas. The picture of light being a wave phenomenon with only its interactions with matter being quantized fits all observations, as far as I can tell.
Jeroen Belleman
(I'm enjoying this conversation, but it's well over bed time here. Good night.)
Were they mad? What they did was very cool, even though they got a null result. It perplexed a bunch of people for some years.
Nowadays, it couldn't be done. The mercury wouldn't be allowed. Maybe use an air hockey sort of table? I'm amazed they could get interferance over those sorts of distances using incohernet white light.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
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Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
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Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
To get back on topic, alittle, today I was successful in getting a LED to avalanche to see what all this noise is about. I just had to find a low enough reverse break down unit in my drawer to make it work.
I found one that breaks down at 18 volts and I used a 330k R, because it was convenient.
I found that the avalanche current at 35uA was the maximum current needed, any more just didn't generate any additional results.
Any way, using my 350 MHz scope, I can't be sure of what I am seeing ? The image almost looks intelligent in nature instead of random noise?
What I see is a slow turn on of the LED or slow reverse leakage building up then at some point, it quickly snaps loose and allows a fast raise in signal. One could say it's a saw tooth, one that isn't exactly constant.
It is one of the most unique effect in nature I've seen, if it actually is that and not something man made that is being detected ?
A noisy sawtooth is what most zener diodes do at low currents.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser drivers and controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
On a sunny day (Sat, 05 May 2012 20:13:02 -0400) it happened Jamie wrote in :
I had this strange train of thoughts last week. It went like this: Normally we do not want noise, and use lower temperatures to avoid it. In a photo (photon or wave) detector, where we, with EM radiation, knock an electron lose from a nucleus, in MY opinion, and I have stated this several times, if the electron already is 'shaken' a bit by for example external applied heat, it should leave orbit easier. This is why I state: A higher temperature is BETTER for a photon detector. Now if you consider this argument, then in a normal resistor, at say room temperature, there must be EM wave detection happening at a much higher sensitivity than in our 'antennas' etc. In fact the 'noise' would likely be the superimposed noise of all the alien advertising in the universe going on. So like the cosmic background noise when you point a dish to the sky, the resistor noise contains a similar signal. So maybe your signal is just alien advertisings streaming to earth from the planet Floston...
But then again, it is Sunday morning, and there may be some flaws in this reasoning that I did not think of today. If I had one I would connect the spectrum analyzer to your experiment to see if any alien or earth messages in the form of carriers with sidebands were sticking out, and then sip some more coffee. :-)
OTOH our modern digital transmissions look so much like true random noise, maybe it is not easy to detect alien transmissions that are possibly encrypted with even more advanced algorithms.
Could this be a simple relaxation oscillator? All the needed parts seem to be present: R, C, and breakdown mechanism. You can definitely make relaxation oscillators from avalanching PN junctions!
(But I've always thought those with NE-2 neon bulbs were even more surprising... somehow we expect "active" stuff from semiconductor junctions, but not dumb ol' neon bulbs.)
Best regards,
Bob Masta DAQARTA v6.02 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
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That's kind of a naive statement. Yes, signing a letter addressed to a president is *political*, but it had everything to do with science. It was a group of scientists who told Roosevelt about the potential for a bomb, who could state their theories about the potential for the bomb, who had some inkling, even then, of how such a bomb might be created. Einstein's name had weight, not because he was a politician, but because he was a scientist.
Both World Wars were heavily based on science. New explosives, poison gases, radar, and of course nuclear weapons, all contributed to these wars. Wars are "political" in nature, but science was still a major factor. It's neither possible nor useful to try to distinguish between what's "scientific" and what's "political" in these wars.
Einstein used his scientific reputation to help encourage the political decision to apply scientific principles to help fight the political conflict we call World War II.
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