greg wrote: > Gabriel Genellina wrote: > >> Before the famous Michelson-Morley experiment (end of s. XIX), some >> physicists would have said "light propagates over ether, some kind of >> matter that fills the whole space but has no measurable mass", but the >> experiment failed to show any evidence of it existence. > > Not just that, but it showed there was something seriously weird > about space and time -- how can light travel at the same speed > relative to *everyone*? Einstein eventually figured it out. > > In hindsight, Maxwell's equations had been shouting "Relativity!" > at them all along, but nobody had seen it. > >> previous experiments showed >> that light was not made of particles either. > > Except that the photoelectric effect showed that it *is* made > of particles. Isn't the universe fun? > >> Until DeBroglie formulated >> its hypothesis of dual nature of matter (and light): wave and particle >> at the same time. > > Really it's neither waves nor particles, but something else for > which there isn't a good word in everyday English. Physicists > seem to have got around that by redefining the word "particle" > to mean that new thing. > > So to get back to the original topic, it doesn't really matter > whether you talk about light travelling or propagating. Take > your pick. > Well the history of physics for at least two hundred years has been a migration away from the intuitive. In strict linguistic terms the word "subatomic" is a fine oxymoron. I suspect it's really "turtles all the way down".
regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
