Originally posted by Sugeo:
Originally posted by Rob:
Right. I've been monitoring the results of this poll and it seems that a lot of you believe in a non-divisible particle. Answer this; can a particle that has zero mass exist?
Mass is inertia; and inertia means that a "particle" can be stationary within an inertial reference frame. The photon ALWAYS move with speed c relative to ALL inertial reference frames. Therefore it has no mass but only kinetic energy. The photon IS divisible. In Compton scatterring a part of it can be absorbed so that a part with less energy remains. I also believe that at a double slit it splits up in two equal parts to move through both slits at the same time so that the two parts can interfere with each other on their way to the screen. At the diffraction screen the interfered wave collapses in order to be absorbed by one of the atoms (the statistical spread of points for different photons collapsing is determined by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Relatiionship for energy and time). If just behind the slit one places a detector to determine through which slit the photon came, the split-photon collapses to a point in order to be "seen" by the detector. The two parts does then not exist anymore and the interference pattern cannot manifest.
Remember, Planck's relationship only says that light with a frequency nu cannot have a lower energy that h times nu. It says NOTHING about the spatial extent of a lightwave. The latter is determined by the boundary conditions.
