If it is approximately correct it must be linked somehow surely or is it just a coincidence?
OK I may try again.
If it is approximately correct it must be linked somehow surely or is it just a coincidence?
OK I may try again.
This is what confuses me, how\why is direction used if it doesn't relate to 'going somewhere'?
Just picture a wave of light as many individual photons oscillating perpendicular to the direction of travel. All photon interactions can now be considered collisions between objects.
Why can’t the state be related to a displacement? Again another pixie question I guess.
So what changes when a Neutrino changes state?
Individual photons can travel through any slit as long as it is bigger than they are of course. Picture it like water only replace water molecules with photons, when a wave of photons travels through a slit the consequent wave will be changed.
You have misunderstood my fault I expect. Radio waves have the same peak-to-peak amplitude as light waves. The difference between light waves and radio waves is that the individual photons for light are oscillating faster hence more energy and shorter wavelengths.
How about my predictions?
sol invictus
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It's not a coincidence at all - it all follows from one principle. Lorentz invariance implies that [latex]$E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2 c^2$[/latex], and that [latex]$p = mv/\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}$[/latex]. For a photon, m=0 and you get E = p*c. For a massive particle moving slowly you get E = m*c^2 + p^2/(2m), and p=m*v. For a fast moving massive particle you can see that E is again close to p*c.
Ziggurat
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Then this is the heart of your confusion. I'm not sure if my explanation will fix that for you, but it's what you'll need to figure out a way to understand. The direction of an electric field tells you which direction a charge would be pushed if it was at that point. But the field exists at that point even if there's no charge there (which there isn't in a vacuum), and even if there is a charge there, if can be moving in a different direction than it's being pushed (for example, a car can be moving forward even while it's being pushed backwards, which is what happens when you're braking).
Why does only one equation relate to a photon? What I mean is why is it only E = p * c and not:
[latex]$p = mv/\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}$[/latex]
putting the numbers in for a photon we get:
p = 0 / 0
If you've answered this already and I have missed it my apologies.
OK so it is a property of a field at a certain point that defines what would happen if a charge was put there is that it? We also have to take into account the charge's properties obviously.
How do we know a field exists in a vacuum without 'seeing' what it does to a charge?
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
The m=0 really refers to the first equation not the second equation (which is the momentum for a massive particle, not a massless particle).Why does only one equation relate to a photon? What I mean is why is it only E = p * c and not:
putting the numbers in for a photon we get:
p = 0 / 0
If you've answered this already and I have missed it my apologies.
sol invictus
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That equation applies to the photon in a sense. Consider a particle with mass m and speed v. Now imagine you could reduce its mass while increasing its velocity in such a way that p remains constant. As you do that, you'll find that E gets closer and closer to p*c. You can think of massless particles like the photon as the limit that m->0 of that process.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Can you give us the mathematics behind these predictions so that we can check them?
The first is exactly what we observe and predict using existsing theory.
The second is not observed (the energy of a photon matches the existing theory) but you need to define how amplitude is going to be measured.
The OT has "Picture the photon as a particle with a very small mass that travels in a wave like manner where all the waves have an equal peak-to-peak amplitude".
What is waving and in what? This sounds like aether theory.
The nice thing about electromagnetic waves is that they do not need a medium to wave in.
Ziggurat
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Yes.
Why? For a given field, we would need to know the charge in order to calculate the force acting on it, but if we're only interested in the field itself, then the details of our hypothetical test charge are irrelevant. Even if we're doing an actual measurement, we should be able to measure the same field (and get the same result) using different test charges.
This is essentially the same question of whether or not the fields are real at all. Suppose we've got a source charge, and we probe its field by seeing what it does to some small test charge. By moving the test charge around, we map out a field. Can you accept that the field from the source charge will remain even if we remove the test charge? If you can, then that's basically your answer: by doing exactly that, we can deduce the equations we need to predict magnetic and electric fields, we can test them with test charges, and if all our tests work out (and they do), then we assume that they are correct even when we're not doing measurements. If you cannot accept that the field remains when the test charge is gone, well, we've hit an impasse.
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Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
martu: A problem with your picture - it assumes that photons just wander around in space. Photons are also created, e.g. by the transition of electrons between energy levels in an atom. But Special Relativity states that it takes an infinite amount of energy to get a massive particle to the speed of light. So your pictured photons cannot be travelling at the speed of light. Thus your picture is wrong.
Why? Why can we use the first equation for the photon but not the second?
It is an interpretation of what we see currently, all the existing maths works with it. What if the photon amplitude was less than the Planck Length? I know, what ifs...
Yes I know no medium is required for this. I’ll try an analogy though that might make matters worse…
Imagine a flow of water from one place to another. Now zoom in and picture an individual water molecule in that flow. Now restrict each molecule so that it travels in a straight line in the direction of flow with a small oscillation perpendicular to the direction of travel.
Now consider that water molecule to be a photon and the flow to be a beam of light. The more intense the beam of light the more photons in the flow. The more energy an individual photon has the faster it is oscillating.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Your anology has the water as the medium.
There is no medium needed for an electromagnetic wave (which does not have mass).
There is a meduim neded for your picture of a photon "that travels in a wave like manner" (and infinite energy needed to get it up to the speed of light)
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Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Beacuse m=0 ... and the second equation is for a particle with m not 0.
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The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
It would need something to contain that oscillation. In water surface waves it is gravity that brings the water molecules into the trough of the wave and higher pressure in the water that drives the crest up. No such mechanism for positional oscillation exists for photons. Even sound waves which are longitudinal result from an increase and decrease in pressure (also contained by gravity) along the direction of travel, were you to graph the changes in pressure you would get a sine wave representing the pressure variations yet the air does not move up and down like waves on the surface of water but instead move back and forth. Both sound and water waves represent pressure oscillation in a media (water or air), electromagnetic waves were once thought to be similar oscillations in the a ‘luminiferous aether’ but experimentation has demonstrated that this is not the case
It is related to position (or the probability of detecting an electron at some position) but not a displacement like waves on water or even longitudinal wave like sound.
It is not so much that the Neutrino changes state, but that the traveling neutrino is a superposition of mass and flavor states, it is the probability of which flavor you will most likely detect at any give time and location that changes or oscillates.
OK then photons arte the medium, I thought you meant a medium is required for photons to travel through. A beam of light in a vacuum is a stream of photons travelling as described, what characteristic of light can’t be explained this way?
Which equation are you using for the infinite energy consequence?
Why does it only work if m > 0, that is my question? Is it merely because?