How weird is a photon?

[Baruch]

Einstein was able to imagine stuff that led to real solutions. OTOH, I can't say the same about your posts.

Only Einstein has a valid imagination?  Are you sure you shouldn't be worshipping (snark) at the shrine of Niels Bohr?  (Its a Danish brewery)  And since when do I have to equal Einstein (other than I have more sensible religious positions than he had) ... do you?

[Baruch]

We cannot see radiation
We cannot see dark matter
We cannot see atoms or particles
We cannot see x rays or gamma rays 
We cannot see ultra violet or infra red light
We cannot see through non transparent matter
We can only see a tiny section of the light spectrum
And so what we see and what is there are not the same

If you can see the Cherenkov light from the radiation, you are way too close!  Things not seen, aren't unreal ... otherwise the idea you have, before you are aware of it, couldn't have existed.

[surreptitious57]

Einstein might have had a great imagination but he failed to imagine the possibility
of quantum mechanics actually being true. How ironic then that he was responsible
for one of the twin pillars of twentieth century physics yet virtually denied the other

[facebook164]

If a photon had perspective, it would see no time and no space. As a particle of zero mass, everything to a photon is instantaneously at the same point. It never experience time or travelling. The  'here' and 'there' are in the same place, and you depart and arrive at the same time without traveling. Cool... hmm, not really, more like boring...

Photons are just energy interactions. Do they really travel? you cannot detect a photon without destroying it so in what meaning is it really there when not interacting?

[kilodelta]

#photonlivesmatter

[josephpalazzo]

Einstein might have had a great imagination but he failed to imagine the possibility
of quantum mechanics actually being true. How ironic then that he was responsible
for one of the twin pillars of twentieth century physics yet virtually denied the other

I think you're being too harsh. Besides vastly contributing to QM, Einstein believed that it was incomplete. In a certain way he was right, the real theory is QFT.

[josephpalazzo]

Photons are just energy interactions. Do they really travel? you cannot detect a photon without destroying it so in what meaning is it really there when not interacting?

Photons are a lot more complex than that. In interactions, they are off-shell, meaning they have non-zero mass. This is permitted by the Uncertainty principle. They are also virtual, meaning you can't see them, but can only infer the photon through the interactions. In non-interacting situations, they have zero mass and behave like waves at low energy, particles at high energy.

[Baruch]

Photons are just energy interactions. Do they really travel? you cannot detect a photon without destroying it so in what meaning is it really there when not interacting?

You should get a PhD in physics ... you have interesting ideas.  The "interaction" idea has been tried, that was my point regarding the Wheeler-Feynman theory that Joe brushed off with "get off my grass".

[josephpalazzo]

.  The "interaction" idea has been tried, that was my point regarding the Wheeler-Feynman theory that Joe brushed off with "get off my grass".

The interaction concept was proposed by Yukawa, which goes as far back as in the 1930's. It's part of standard QFT.

The problem with your posts is that you are misinformed and your knowledge of the subject is superficial at best, but most of the times wrongheaded. The Wheeler-Feynman theory never got on track. It might hold interest for history nostalgia buff, but like many theories that were proposed in the 1940's, 50's and 60's it's just a curiosity item.

[Baruch]

QFM might be the best we have now ... but if you don't have perspective, one can't appreciate how things got to this point, or where we go from here.  If the point was, a grad student who needs to really be very good at the current state of the art QFM, because he will we working at CERN ... then you have a good point.  I watch recent grad school QFM lectures from time to time on Youtube.  But I don't think there is anyone here in that category ... the interest is much more casual.  And I am not sure that older ideas won't be re-used in the future.  That is what happened with the original string theory, which was a failed nuclear forces theory.  And a lot of the other work is Kaluza-Klein from the 1920s.

Of course Wheeler-Feynman were building on other people's work ... obviously Yukawa's rather brilliant idea.  But you seem allergic to physics that is less than a year old, or physicists who are past their prime, or past completely (with the exception of Einstein).

[josephpalazzo]

Of course Wheeler-Feynman were building on other people's work ... obviously Yukawa's rather brilliant idea.  But you seem allergic to physics that is less than a year old, or physicists who are past their prime, or past completely (with the exception of Einstein).

Less than a year old??? The Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory was published in 1945. Get your facts straightened out. Not only it is old but it NEVER got on track. Just because it was proposed by two famous names it doesn't make it a correct theory, even less because there is a wikipage on it. As I said before, you have a very superficial knowledge of physics, and so when you read from FAUX NEWS on the net about some topics in physics, you are easily taken in line, hook and sinker.

[Unbeliever]

Now it takes eight minutes and seventeen seconds for a photon to travel ninety three million
miles from the Sun to the Earth from our external frame of reference. But for the photon the
distance like any other is travelled instantly. So reality really is not what we perceive it to be

It takes about a million years for a photon to make its way out from the center to the surface of the sun, then only about 8 minutes to get here. The photon gets absorbed and re-emitted, I think, many times in the process.

[Baruch]

It takes about a million years for a photon to make its way out from the center to the surface of the sun, then only about 8 minutes to get here. The photon gets absorbed and re-emitted, I think, many times in the process.

The greatest energy transfer mechanism in the Sun's mantle, isn't EM or heat, it is sonic.  The Sun roars ... and we could not only be burned to a crisp, but rendered deaf, if the Sun was too close ;-)  Sonic energy moves much faster thru the Sun ... but probably un-quantized.  Regular atomic lattices make quantum sound ... called phonons.

[josephpalazzo]

The greatest energy transfer mechanism in the Sun's mantle, isn't EM or heat, it is sonic.  The Sun roars ... and we could not only be burned to a crisp, but rendered deaf, if the Sun was too close ;-)  Sonic energy moves much faster thru the Sun ... but probably un-quantized.  Regular atomic lattices make quantum sound ... called phonons.

Baruch, I made corrections to your previous post, yet you've ignored those. I've asked you before and I'm asking you again: stay out of my thread if you're only going to post nonsense, start your own thread.

[Baruch]

So are you saying that the turbulence of the Sun is quantized?  Seems pretty classically chaotic to my mind's eye.