Photon counting for the masses

Over history in general, however, science was almost always looked down upon by religion. For most of this time, religion was in power, though, and science was probably seen as a genuine threat to that power.

The hippies did introduce an anti-intellectualism or anti-rationalism, and tried to base spirituality on that. Don't think, just believe. So yes, there was some of that also.

Yes, true on many counts. However, science has *not* been an unmixed blessing. Moreover, it's not so much what the reality is, but what the perception is.

Science was once expected to solve all our problems. It failed. Of course. Disappointed people began questioning whether science was necessary, useful, etc., etc. People nowadays are refusing to have their kids vaccinated, because they fear the vaccinations cause autism. They avoid food preservatives because the chemicals are harmful. They do this because they never saw or experienced bad food poisoning, never saw what an epidemic could do to kids. They simply don't remember (or never knew) the bad old days, so they make idiotic decisions.

Some conclude that everything should be "natural," not understanding that "natural" implies natural selection, dying off of the weaker and less resistant, untold suffering from disease and starvation.

Yes.

Right. It's often not even in the Bible they claim to be relying on.

What Fundamentalism offers is complete certainty. Unfortunately, certainty has no place in reality.

Cross-pollination is one thing; trying to force one onto the other is another. I'm all for cross pollination, for the exchanges of ideas between two seemingly unrelated areas. Lots of wonderful stuff has come from such exchanges. But to insist that physical reality is the way scripture says it is, and to defer to scripture when observation shows otherwise, is forcing things. I imagine science trying to claim that God can't exist because He violates the laws of thermodynamics would be something in the other direction.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think sometimes it's just people out looking for a bad guy to blame their unhappiness on; for a Fundamentalist, it's the scientists. For the scientists, it's the damned Bible-thumpers. And so on, and so forth...

--
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems 
theory.
Reply to
Chiron
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Of course, you're right. But it's not what a *lot* of people think. As I mentioned in another post, we have otherwise intelligent people refusing vaccinations for their kids because of the risks - some of which exist, some of which are bullshit. We have people refusing medical treatment for easily-treated illnesses, letting them get out of control. People refusing to use preservatives in food, and so on and so forth.

We're a generation who has missed most of the horrors people had to live with not too long ago - epidemics, food poisoning, famines because of food spoilage or because of poor crop yields, epidemics of cholera, typhus, and other illness from polluted water and infected vermin, etc.

That's part of the problem. Science did such a great job of improving our lives, we no longer live in fear of the things our ancestors did; we no longer understand that the minute risk of a bad reaction to a vaccine is a small price to pay for avoiding epidemics of polio, smallpox, whooping cough, etc., that killed thousands of kids every year.

Add to that the anti-rationalism of my (Boomer) generation, and you get a bunch of people who want to "get back to the garden," not realizing that this wasn't the Garden of Eden, but the Garden of Earthly Delights

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And in fairness, not all of science has brought us benefits. Science brought us poison gases, explosives, better firearms, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, some horrific pollution (and incidents like Bhopal), mysterious illness, etc. We haven't always used science wisely; though I do believe that we are now too far gone to abandon science. If we gave it up right now, there would be an immediate collapse of the population as we became unable to provide enough food for everyone. There would also be massive epidemics of diseases, etc.

We're already committed to this path. We just need to become much more careful about what we use science to accomplish.

--
Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments'
		-- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
Reply to
Chiron

It's the absence of the _possibility_ of a mechanistic explanation, as shown by the no-hidden-variables theorem that I've heard discussed but never actually gone through. And it isn't theology, just philosophy--and the philosophical basis of mechanism is broken in several elementary ways that have been known since the time of Plato. We moderns are no better than illiterates when it comes to the history of ideas.

The combination of large information inputs with large-scale noise amplifiers (such as the weather) means that there is no possibility of exact predictions over long time scales, so that determinism fails. I had a whack at this in an old blog post, for anyone who's interested, but of course I'm also not a philosopher.

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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
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Nonsense. Knowing something about how God does things has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether or not He's the one doing it.

As the old joke goes, there was a debate between a biologist and God:

Biologist: "We don't need you--see, I can make life forms too! I just take some ordinary dirt,...

God: "Hey! Get your own dirt!"

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
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

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Hmm, Are we still talking about using the LEDs photo detectors?

The beauty of these LEDs is you get nice big pulses.. makes 'em easy to count.

Send me an address via email and I'll put some GaP LEDs in the mail for you.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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In optical pumping the absorption of one RF 'photon' (changing the spin state of an atom) can allow the atom to go into an state where it absorbs an optical photon.) The energy gain is enormous.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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Hey if anyone finds the above mentioned Willis Lamb article on the web (for free) please post the link.

Thanks,

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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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
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

It can be done, more or less as George said--you use RF to, for example, flip the nuclear spin of some atom, and measure the result by looking at its optical absorption. A spin flip can change an optical emission process from one that is dipole-allowed to dipole-forbidden, and vice versa.

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
http://electrooptical.net
Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Hmm, kind of a parametric amplifier deal. Neat. Detecting the actual quanta exchanged at GHz (

Reply to
Tim Williams

Certainly! After all, photons are bosons, while billiard balls are fermions (or composed of them, at least) :)

Wave-particle duality is an extremely useful worldview, just as important as atomism is (matter is made of atoms that both attract and repel, so you can deduce a lot about matter from that simple fact). It works for antennas, it works for light, it works for electrons in a semiconductor and it works for particle physics. The hump or wiggle you get in the amplitude (or probability) wave function corresponds directly, and inversely proportionally, with the energy or frequency domain. So much of the world is basically just playing with Fourier transforms, multiplying and convolving various functions and boundary conditions.

If you can mentally divorce yourself from the concept of hard line-of-sight geometry, you have gains not only in E&M but all these fields.

What is "Planck length" other than a very minute measure of length?

The region of uncertainty of a 500nm photon is about 500nm, give or take the line width you're trying to measure it to.

If you want to know its wavelength to 1%, say, you're necessarily going to sacrifice some positional error by the Uncertainty principle -- which is really more fundamental than a physical law, it's simply algebra around physically significant Fourier transforms.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
Reply to
Tim Williams

On a sunny day (Sun, 06 May 2012 22:59:52 +0200) it happened Jeroen wrote in :

'science',

leaving earth atmosphere to make such a

A lot of things are attributed to what Einstein said, and how, just like the bible is explained by many in many different ways, these days Einstein is the god of present quack science.

I agree, I usually settle for 2 digits behind the comma (Europa) or dot (rest of the world).

But as to speed, when we look at the *cause* of gravity, and those who know about my postings know I am a big Le Saga ?believer?[1], in such a system, one that explains many problems current 'science' seems to have, the Le Saga particles need to travel FTL.

So until Einstein's dogma is ditched, there is NO way gravity and many anomalies observed connected to it, can be understood. This was Einstein's last statements: "I have failed to unite gravity with the other forces of nature." Of course he failed, he proposed a dogma that made it impossible. Trapped in his own net,

[1] believer is the wrong word, it is the only logical conclusion I can come up with, and that usually is the right one. You can interpret this sentence any way you like :-)
Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sun, 06 May 2012 12:42:03 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Le Saga particles.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sun, 06 May 2012 22:39:31 GMT) it happened Chiron wrote in :

Can a surfer go faster than the waves he rides on? We accelerate those (charged) particles with EM fields (usually big magnets that are switched, or electrostatic fields). The surfer (the particle) cannot go faster than the waves, But for a very high amplitude wave, the surfer can be smashed onto the rocks with incredible force.

He never made a theory, that is exactly the point. He tinkered a formula, that sort of gave the right answers in many cases. Doing that he gave up 'understanding' in the form of a _mechanism_, and that was the end of science. Until the apes wake up, if not they go extinct before that.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

They are waves except when you detect them when the energy in a single photon is dumped in one spot with a probability predicted by the wave amplitude. This gets particularly interesting when the photons carry the right sort of energy to activate chemical reactions.

It is still quantised but in steps that are so small that to all intents and purposes it behaves as if it was a continuum. See

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The smallest step of action is h/2pi and the wavelength of the lowest possible energy photon is just a few orders of magnitude less than the diameter of the visible universe.

For a pair of conjugate variables like time and frequency or position and momentum constraining one necessarily makes the other more uncertain. This is at the root of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle.

He does, but the steps are so fine that apart from in very special circumstances like superconducting quantum interference devices we cannot normally see the difference.

You can quickly get into semantic arguments here. The laws of physics codify what we know about the way nature works. The quantum mechanics I was taught are a subset of the more complete quantum chromodynamics formalism which is itself a subset of an even more difficult to understand theoretical framework. At some level you have to leave the handful of physicists who can manipulate these models to get on with it and then test the predictions they make to destruction.

We will never know what is really happening. If decent sized quantum computers can ever be constructed in our universe then it becomes highly likely that *we* are *inside* a simulation! Shades of TRON...

--
Regards,
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

Yes it is but the steps are so tiny that it might as well be thought of as a continuum.

You seem to be unaware of parametric amplifiers which work by splitting a photon using birefringence and non-linear optics.

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The simplest parametric amplifiers amplify at f using an energy source pumping frequency 2f. Child on a swing is the simplest case.

It isn't indivisible if you are cunning enough in the experiment.

Frequency doublers are admittedly more common (green laser pens).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

absolutely! (either you picked a bad analogy, or you're trolling)

usually electrostatic fields are switched, magnets store too much energy

with incredible force.

anyway this has no bearing on the claim above. the relationship between speed and energy can be meaured. and as far as can be determined it follows the predictions of relativity.

--
?? 100% natural

--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to news@netfront.net
Reply to
Jasen Betts

You're getting side bands on your amplitude mudulated light pulses? Cool!

--
?? 100% natural

--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to news@netfront.net
Reply to
Jasen Betts

I have long had a problem with this sentiment. It seems to be allowing religion a free pass to make up whatever it wants, and simply claim that there is no evidence in the real world because "it's in a different domain".

Why should *anyone* be absolved from having to provide evidence for their claims? Religious claims are indeed in a "different domain of existence" ... the domain of speculation.

Science is the study of reality. Anything beyond that is sheer speculation until there is corroborating evidence. Then it falls into the domain of science.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v6.02 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter Frequency Counter, FREE Signal Generator Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI Science with your sound card!

Reply to
Bob Masta

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You 'da man! Much thanks, George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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