On Tuesday, August 26, 2025 at 8:36:42 AM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 3:52 AM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *>> A photon is a point particle that has a wave LENGTH. In the early days of Quantum Mechanics they called something that has both particle and wave properties a "wavicle" but for some reason the term never caught on, I think that's a pity because "wave" and "particle" are just words and thanks to Quantum Mechanics we now know that some things don't fit in with either of those words. If that seems strange and confusing it's only because it is strange and confusing. * *Nevertheless it remains true that a photon is a point particle that has a wave LENGTH, and if you know the wave LENGTH of that wavicle then you can calculate its energy, and the longer the LENGTH the less energy it has. And if space is expanding then everything that has LENGTH will expand with it unless there is a force available to counteract it; and in the case of the photon, unlike our local group of galaxies, there is not. * *> Clearly, you're seduced by a word, and that word is "length".* *If "expanding space" doesn't mean that lengths expand then then what the hell does it mean? * *> And, as I've repeatedly stated, the "wave" of a photon is an ENSEMBLE property, and simply not detectable for single events.* *That is simply not true. Individual photons can and have been polarized and that is a wave property. If you pick a direction at random and call that "up" and rotate a polarizing filter to the up direction, and if a** previously unmeasured photon makes it through that filter, then there is a 100% chance the photon will make it through a second filter** that is also in the up direction, but if you rotate the filter by 90° then there is a 0% probability the photon will make it through the third filter. And in all of this we're dealing with one single photon. * *Interesting. It seems that the photon has no polarization until it's measured in some direction. Not sure what this means wrt the alleged stretching phenomenon. AG * *And Newton discovered about 350 years ago that different colors have different wavelengths. In 1905 Einstein explained how the recently discovered "photoelectric effect" works by showing for the first time that light is made of photons and that the energy in a single photon is inversely proportional to its wavelength (E = hc/λ), it's why Einstein got the Nobel prize, it was not for relativity. Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light and it has been experimentally confirmed many many times that a single red photon has less energy than a single blue photon in exactly the way that Einstein predicted. * *I think your confusion over this is because although individual photons definitely exhibit wave characteristics, in addition to that Quantum Mechanics is also able to give us predictions that, because they are statistical, can only be verified by repeating an experiment many times. For example if the polarizing filter in the above example is rotated by just 45° not 90° then there is a 50% chance the photon will make it through the filter, the general formula for the probability of transmission is cos²(ø) where ø is the difference between the angles of the two filters. Because that probability is not 0% or 100% the validity of the prediction can only be made statistically after several trials, but that doesn't change the fact that single photons have been experimentally verified to have both wave and particle properties. Ev**en if somebody didn't know any quantum or classical physics they could derive the second law by just using logic and the fact that there are more ways to be disordered than ordered. To exactly state the first law of thermodynamics, the one about conservation of energy, you'd need to write a lot and use the word "however" many times and put in lots and lots of footnotes about exceptions and additional explanations. But even a thousand years from now nothing like that will be needed for the second law for the same reason that no footnotes will ever be needed for the fact that 2+2=4. * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/0432b973-00e6-4427-be15-c140808cadb6n%40googlegroups.com.
