Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Energy conservation in curved spacetime.

A photon’s energy depends on its frequency (f). Higher frequency = greater energy.

If a photon travels through space having E = f1, and enters a gravity well, it is blue-shifted, its energy becomes E = f2.

As f 2 > f1; if measured at any point in the gravity well, the photon’s energy is greater than it was when in space.
Where does the extra energy come from?

Two possible answers suggest themselves.
1. It comes from the gravitational energy of curved spacetime.
2. Energy is not globally conserved in curved spacetime.

The third choice is one needs to take care when one chooses a frame of reference in a problem.

A person places a bullet in a gun and fires it. You may calculate the energy that was imparted from the bullet into the gun as the gun speeds away from the bullet which is stationary and contains no energy because it isn't moving in its reference frame. That person speeding toward the bullet passed right around the bullet which was sort of surprising to the bullet because the person was much bigger than it and it was shocked how fast people can move.

Everything in that statement is correct from the bullets frame of reference, but that is probably not how you would see the events and to have it described in that way you would call very deceptive and possibly wrong regardless of it's technical accuracy.

It does not violate conservation laws for two observers to measure totally different energies, it is the normal as the energy of the bullet in the above answer demonstrates.

Interpretation of events is subjective to view point, and physics can not tell you a position that is more correct than any other. If you get differences you need to consider do you have the same reference point.

Would you care to think carefully about your reference frame, for example do you have only one in the above example

That works for your bullet and gun, but don't you run into problems if the propagant is a photon?

Let me be blunt, give me the reference frame you can see the photon BLUE and NORMAL. Where exactly in space are you going to stand to see that ... think hard.

Lets take you back to the discussion with Paul and the 3D wave that collapses at one point. You get to observe a photon in exactly ONE location in space and time and once observed it collapses everywhere else. So your discussion first involves at least two different photons (they might be the same at source .. hint that could be a good reference frame) and you aren't even observing them from the same point. Viewed from the source it becomes obvious the background is what is changing !

Do you get it you may see a photon either BLUE or NORMAL but NEVER BOTH. You are constructing some GOD reference frame in your head that simply doesn't exist for multiple reasons. This is the the same rubbish people do with time stopping on the event horizon of a black hole and think its real.

What I should have done in the GUN/BULLET case is mixed statements from the bullet reference frame and statements from the gun reference because that is most certainly what you are doing.

So pick any reference frame you like, but stop using two reference frames and trying to claim them as one. You aren't GOD and you can't be in both reference frames at the same time and nor can the photon. The photon isn't NORMAL and then GOES BLUE as it goes along, it never changes what is changing is the background AKA YOU. A bird flying and landing on a power line change does not change it's voltage either, even though from you view point you may try and claim that.

Different OBSERVERS see things differently but that has nothing to do with the photon which remains oblivious and cares nothing for you observers who only have limited relevance to it until they become casually linked. The bird when landing on a power line may touch another power line and it will suddenly find the placid line it was landing on, suddenly kills it. What the bird did was make contact with two different backgrounds, which independently were safe.

So the BLUE and NORMAL is only meaningful to YOU, the photon is always NORMAL and unchanging .. where YOU ARE STANDING TO OBSERVE IS WHAT IS CHANGING.

This naive idea that layman seem to get that standing here in some location that you can claim time really stops at an event horizon or that a photon "really" changes to blue does my head in. The universe doesn't revolve around humans and they aren't god and given a special reference frame, your reference frame background matters ALWAYS.

So lets put a simple physical example to your photon above.

A) I am driving a car and I have an accident at 15mph running into a brick wall. I survive and after a brief stint in hospital get back to driving.

B) Unfortunately on the way home from hospital at 15mph I run up the tail of a slow moving bus doing 13mph. My injuries from this accident are so minor I am discharged within hours.

C) Resuming my trip home at 15mph I pull out to pass another slow bus. Unfortunately I pull out and run head on into a car doing 20mph coming the other way. I am pronounced dead at the scene.

I was moving at the same speed in the same car (and hence same energy I thought) in all three crashes, so why was the result of my crash so different ... what caused the energy of the crash to change?

In B my car appeared to have less energy in the crash hence my car was redshifted. In C my car appeared to have extra energy in the crash and hence my car was blueshifted. Those descriptions are exactly consistent to what you did to the photon above and I am using the same reference frames. So I ask your question now, what changes the car energy change as it drives along and where does the energy go and come from in the red and blue shift?

I am hoping you can clearly see my car energy never changed, what changed was the background AKA everything else.

Wait I am dead ... you caught a lucky break

Orac, the only problem I have with anything you say in your last two posts is that I think you missed the (simple) point I was making.

SR says that we can consider the gun to be stationary, and the bullet moving, or the bullet stationary and the gun moving, but it does not permit a RF in which the photon is stationary, and the emitter moving.

That’s all.

Sorry you didn’t survive your third crash. Had you survived, I would seriously suggest you consider giving up driving.

Considering this in the light of your traffic analogy, there seems to be a fundamental difference.

If I measure the energy of your car at any point, it remains unchanged; only the energy of the interactions alters.

If I measure the energy of the photon before and after it enters the gravity well (f1 & f2) would I not find it had changed?

The DAMAGE TO ME IS A RAW MEASUREMENT and the energy most definitely changed, so I just falsified that statement. You are adjusting the measurement in your head using logic and understanding to say that.

This is what I am trying to make you realize measurement involves some understanding of background. What you are trying to say is when you measure things in the crash you understand what is moving and what isn't and you adjust your calculation and deduce my car and I still had the same energy. The raw measurement which was the damage to me most certainly changed but you realized why.


Now we are back to the second problem you don't get to measure a photon twice ... NOT EVER ... they are absorbed by any measurement. You may measure one photon prior to the gravity well, and you may measure a second different photon inside the gravity well. This immediately identifies you better go back to the source and make sure the two photons were the same at source and in doing so you have realized you need to consider the backgrounds at the three point 1.) the source, 2.) measurement point 1, 3.) measurement point 2. Now once you do that equate all the energies which is the same as the car crash and my damage as a raw measurement.

The same situation as the car crash happens with your raw measurement which will show an increase in energy but you will realize it's just the background that makes it look like that. The photon hasn't gained or lost any energy it's just being measured in a different point in space.

Keep in mind that here Bill S. is talking about a thought experiment. In a thought experiment you can do just about any impossible thing, such as measuring the energy of a photon twice.

Bill Gill

Whenever I do thought experiments I stick to the laws of physics it's just discussions about experiments that are hard/dangerous or unethical to setup. Sometimes I might choose to vary one thing and show consequences but that is about it.

I don't get your answer here Bill G, so if I am allowed anything what is to stop me saying something ridiculous like little invisible purple aliens add and subtract energy as required. What is the point of a thought experiment that allows breaking all the laws of physics and anything to happen?

To me your suggestion sounds more like discussion had in philosophy and religion not science and not something I am comfortable with.

I guess you can have such thought experiments just leave me out .. besides I am still dead ATM

Even as I posted, I thought I should have used a conditional phrase: "If I were able to measure.....". Then I thought I would leave it, to see how predictable Orac was.

It seems that the safe "scientific answer" has to be that we don't know if a photon would gain energy on entering a gravity well because we cannot make the necessary measurements. Of course, we can measure the blue shift of a large number of photons, but how can we be sure that an individual photon would behave in the same way as a group?

Now that is one of the core questions about all of our scientific 'facts'. We can determine how things work to a high degree of certainty, but there is always some limit to how closely we can measure, and I'm not talking about the uncertainty principle. I'm just talking about basic measurement uncertainties. So, in fact, the best we can say is that 'it is true as far as we have been able to measure it.'

Bill Gill

It's actually worse than that Bill G, if we are going to go down this sort of layman "facts" path then you can't say the photon does enter the gravity well at all. You have no ability to track a photon at all at any point in it's travel.

So actually you can't say anything at all about the photons movements to the level of certainty Bill S is demanding as being scientific. The only certainty Bill S can know to the level he wants is that it is present where he measures it and it has no energy until that time.

To show that you can do a thought experiment that from the source the photon is spreading out in it's 3D sphere and if the gravity well is any distance from the source there will be more of the wave out of the gravity well than in it. So if the gravity well is changing the energy of the photon it can only be in that portion of the photon wave that is in the well. So now move the source further or closer .. what should happen? Big hint here Bill S think about this and your wanting to add and subtract energy to the photon as it enters the gravity well. Do you see the photon seems to "gain" the same consistent amount so maybe it's the collapse to a point in the gravity well that changes the energy not the entering it?

So Bill S I have to ask do photons spread out in a 3D sphere and collapse point or are they particles flying in straight lines as per above it matters to entering the gravity well problem?

I put it to you that the invisible purple aliens watching you know when you are about to measure and put the photon where it needs to be, as per my original thought experiment

Now back on the other tangent, Bill G's answer is totally correct and the word he didn't use is measurement background, and every and any measurement requires a background or reference to which the measurement refers, and which the measured magnitude is derived from.

Yes, Bill S I am being predictable again, I am not insisting on a correct answer but making you work thru the answer you give. The correct answer(s) are the only ones that will stand up to scrutiny and I need not insist on them being right, you will work it out for yourself.

Bill S you are at the point you need to work out how you will decide what an acceptable measurement background is. To get you started that lets give a start point and get you to realize you are using "conjoint measurement theory", there are other types. Within your concept there is a problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement

That is the basis you rejected the measurements as being quote "unscientific", it didn't meet your criteria so name the criteria and lets see what I can do with it.

Hmm yep think I tidied up all the loose ends and covered everything.

Thanks for the brainstorm. Your discussion is a good example for the connection between the relativity theory and the gravity wells in the universe. Energy does change depending on the environment but without motion this is impossible. The two possibilities are either the curved space time causes energy release or energy increase. Yet, this can be relatively accurate when examined from the certain gravity well.

If energy can only exist with motion then what is potential energy, chemical energy, nuclear energy and possibly dark energy none of which require motion at all. The idea is naive and has been falsified for probably well over 200 years.

Many physicists would argue photons should not be called energy either even though you can write a formula for energy for them and this is the problem Bill S was grappling with. Technically photons are simply the potential to become energy and they must collapse to a point in spacetime to do so, but it leaves you with the problem what was the photon before that?

If you want to push a physicist on what a photon is well then it is a ripple in quantum fields that may or may not become "stuff" which you would call energy, that is all we can say.

If you push us on what energy is well it certainly isn't matter and it isn't motion but it exists in those things. What it is as best we can tell is the exchange of information in the fields of the universe.

I was playing a game with Bill S who has discussed photons and QFT enough to work out the problem with his idea if he thinks about it. The problem is pretty basic most of the "photon wave" doesn't even go into the gravity well, especially if the source is outside the well. In that situation at least half of the "photon wave" 3D sphere is actually going away from it. It's only when it collapses to a point because of measurement within the gravity well that it actually "enters" the gravity well in a formal sense. Think about a wave reaching the centre of the well but being observed somewhere outside the well and suddenly the energy it supposedly gained vanishes.

Trying to construct any concept that the photon gains and loses energy in the proper 3D spherical photon emission scheme is ridiculous. It was only working in Bill S's head because he had turned the photon to a tennis ball like particle which flew along in a straight line to where he measured it, something we teach the kiddies at school and probably shouldn't as he just illustrated why.

I was surprised it was taking him so long to see the problem and I was having to give so many hints.

Can you relate this to the double slit experiment where photons are sent through singly?

Yes it always has been the explaination of why it interference with itself in that the waves pass thru both slits. We don't talk about the part of the wave that are also going away from the slits but however lets do that now.

So our photon wave passes thru slits and is on is half way on it's way to a view point we have setup to see the normal interference. At that exact instant we actually observe the photon at the point the same distance behind the source point and away from the slits so our "part of the wave" we are observing hasn't gone thru any slits. The observation collapses the wave to that single point and it shows no interference pattern at all, it reflects the conditions of the part wave that we encountered only.

The key point to this is each part of the wave seems unconnected to other parts of the wave and they know nothing of each others histories. The collapse to a point only reflects the history of the wave reaching the observation point.

This is what make photons tricky because you can't make them real or energy or having interactions until they collapse to a point. Good old Prof Matt Strassler in his articles does a good job on it

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-a...alse-dichotomy/

He basically ends up saying the same thing we all do, quote "Photons should not be called `energy’, or `pure energy’, or anything similar."

The key point that determines what happens with a photon is at collapse point and you really can't construct histories or interactions with anything until you have a collapse point. It is what makes your OP statement misguided and what makes the double slit experiment do peoples head in especially in things like delayed choice and quantum eraser experiments when they construct histories and say things like well the photon has passed thru the slit ... well no it didn't until it collapses to a point.

So the answer to your OP question is the photon doesn't change energy and can't. The energy difference is simply a reflection of the energy differences between the background of the source point and the point of measurement.

The thing to ponder is does that mean even a point in empty space has energy or is the energy background something to do with being able to measure?

After all that discussion you should be able to follow this now which is basically the same thing with entangled atoms. The waveform view and the particle view differ markedly as in your original post of an photon entering a gravity well.

There detector can detect the wave without collapsing it by using some QM tricks of entanglement. I thought that bit might interest you.

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-atoms-entangled-emit.html

An interesting article, Orac.



This can't involve using entanglement for FTL information transfer, but it begins to sound that way.

I like to try to answer questions, but I seem to have missed this one.


No; photons do not spread out in a 3D sphere, light does that. Light is not waves or particles. The nearest we can come to modelling light is to say that it travels as something we identify as waves and is – or can be – detected as discrete particles. While travelling as a wave, it spreads out, but this does not introduce gaps, as it might if sufficient spreading revealed a particulate nature.

Only when light is observed can it be "identified" as displaying a particulate nature; beyond which point it can neither spread, nor do anything else.

Perhaps we should consider light as a probability distribution, some properties of which appear to us to be quantized. Could we derive a more appropriate model from that starting point?

On the subject of answering questions; this one is still outstanding.



The point of asking this was to look at the breakdown of SR when the speed of light is involved.
Eg. in the case of the bullet and gun, either can be considered as stationary (depending on the RF), but, as I understand it, there is no RF in which the photon could be considered stationary, whatever motion one attributed to the emitter.

I have no problems with that statement.


You have jumped ahead and I need to check you understand it properly so I need to play devils advocate.

Why is it a probability distribution?
How do you know it is quantized until you measure it?

You already answered that to yourself in your answer above, the photon doesn't exist in any real world reference frame you could ever use it is as you called it "light" up until that point. So there is no real way to equate the bullet gun case unless you assume the particle story of light .. it's a nice fairytale but as you know it won't stand up to scrutiny.

I think we have discussed this before we can use the wave as a reference point for things such as the spin during transit but you must use extreme care in making this frame "real". You can only know that is real post photon observation before that point it is a probability reference.

I think you have got the point that there is nothing special about the double slit experiment, your gravity well example as well as countless other examples like Paul started with show the strange nature of light. I find it funny when layman think that the double slit is the only experiment in which there is some strange behaviour with light and if they can just fix that it will all be ok and there classical world will return.

The double slit experiment is but one of a vast array of experiments which show the problems with understanding light and it will never be able to be described in classical terms.

if 8 photons are required for a human eye to SEE a light flash
then how many photons are required if the human has both eyes open?

would the human only SEE the flash of 8 photons in the
eye that is closest to the flash if it is 8 per eye?

or would each eye absorb 4 flashes each and the human would
never SEE the flash at all if 8 per eye is required?

Paul, assuming you are asking this question seriously, I suggest a thought experiment.

You close your left eye and look for the light. The light travels as a wave. If the amount of light entering your right eye is sufficient for you to detect it (8 photons when detected?), you will see it.

Now ask yourself if opening your left eye would make any difference to the level of light entering your right eye. Would opening your left eye divert light from your right?


I'm coming back to your question, Orac, but I may need a dog walk first to give me some thinking time.

I am serious about this.

if light travels as a wave ( a expanding sphere )

and the human eye requires 8 photons to SEE the light

So if the human has both eyes open then his eyes would
absorb the 8 photons of a light flash of only 8 photons
but he would not SEE any light
because each eye would absorb 4 photons each
and light waves do not choose their path or destination.

so the human would not SEE any light.

we have two eyes that allow us to perceive depth and this
means that each eye must receive 8 photons.

we could say that our eyes are like video cameras and that
our brains form two separate videos from the data collected from our two eyes/video cameras.

am I correct about this or when they decided that the human
eye requires 8 photons did they mean 4 photons for each eye?

I don’t know where your information about the 8 photons came from, and it’s not something I’ve found myself; so I don’t know if it’s 8, or 4 per eye. Whichever it is, if the number arriving per eye is above the threshold we see, if not, we dont.



This gave me the impression you were suggesting the number of photons reaching one eye would diminish if a second eye were opened. That was what I thought you could not be serious about.

orac



yes according to orac it would.

according to orac as soon as a photon is detected it cannot
be detected by any other object.

meaning that if a light source were pulsing a stream of
8 photons at 10 second intervals a person in the room could only see the flash of 8 photons that occurred every 10 seconds if he only had 1 eye opened.

if he opened his other eye at any point in time during the 8 photon stream he would not see the flash of light at all even if 7
photons had already entered into his other eye.

at least thats how he described it would be anyway.

I thought that was really strange myself and I still do
I am almost certain that his description must be in error
because light travels like a expanding sphere.

so if a single photon of light is emitted from a point in space and there are two light detectors one at the spheres northern pole and one at the spheres southern pole only 1 of the detectors would detect the photon of light.

distance from the light emitter didnt matter.

and as soon as the light was detected the wave or sphere collapses.

even if the light had already traveled several light years away from the center of emission in all directions ...

heres something to ponder ... according to oracs explanation

using a small magnifying lens I can get over 3,000 F if I focus
the suns light onto a tiny dot on a surface.

I could probably fit 16 of these onto a 1 sq ft area.

thats 48,000 degrees F onto 1 sq ft of surface area.

1 sq mile of this set up would deliver 1,338,163,200,000 F

since the suns core temp is only 27 million F how can I
get 1.3 trillion F ?

and thats just using 1 sq mile.

I know that there would only be 16 tiny dots of 48,000 F
on each sq ft of the 1 sq mile solar heat array but heat
is additive and it would take a while for the heated plate
to heat up , but it would heat up rather quickly.

we can simply melt the next ice age !!!

correction:

I know that there would only be 16 tiny dots of 3,000 F
that add up to 48,000 F on each sq ft of the 1 sq mile solar heat array but heat is additive and it would take a while for the
heated plate to heat up , but it would heat up rather quickly.

Heat adds, temperature doesn't. There would be however many dots of 3000 degree temperature on the plate.

Bill Gill

Brilliant deduction !!

there would be 16 dots of 3,000 F heat transferring into the
collector plate.

overall the collective amount of heat that would be transferring
into the collector plate would be 48,000 F

the overall temperature of the collector plate could never
achieve a temperature above 3,000 F

but with heat transfer the entire plate could achieve a temperature really close to 3,000 F and this would depend
only on the material and thickness of the collector plate
and the amount of heat that is transferring away from the collector plate via some type of heat sink that is utilized
to collect the heat energy.

such as an array of TEG devices or a fluid tubing system to
circulate the heated fluid to another location for energy conversion or storage such as zeolite.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/13052...heat-than-water

also the tiny dots of 3,000 F can be adjusted to larger dots
that will transfer a lower amount of heat to the collector
plate so that you can have 16 larger dots of say 1,500 F
or 212 F etc by adjusting the distance from the lenses to the
collector plate.

The naive and dare I say childish questions has already been addressed, I really don't feel a need to add anything ... the answer as they say is blatantly obvious.

For the record, the photon sensitivity experiments measuring the sensitivity of of cones and rods in the eye of humans and indeed all animals are historic dating back to 1942. They were revised in 1972, later in 1996 and further works in 2005 & 2011 with eye material grown in vitro. It's all readily available on any search engine.

Not sure why you think you can collect every photon of the sun, you lost me. 10 people standing in a circle and you can't even say who is going to see the single photon and now you are going to demand you harness every single photon of the sun somehow and then you add the temperatures up ... what drugs are you on and where do I get them?

You ignored what Bill said so lets add up all the temperatures of every city and town in the world ... they say there is like 2 Million towns on the earth and lets say each is average a mere 15 deg C .. That makes the earth 30 Million C .... OMG THE EARTH IS HOTTER THAN THE SUN .... I AM DYING .... SEND WATER NOW ... GLOBAL WARMING is all PAUL's fault. Hopefully the message sinks in with this example and you stop wasting our time.

This is all too silly to even bother with .. moving right along.

I considered a typical “Essex” response, like: Wappem was, Oi fink Oi reddit somewhere, mate, innit? That doesn’t quite cut it though.

The answer to both questions is “I don’t know” nor do I know of any experiment I could do that would give me a definitive answer. The best I can do is read what the experts (and possibly some crackpots) think; and see what I can make of it.

As I see it, light doesn’t seem to fit into any classical model, so I have to look towards QM.
Paul does raise some interesting points about how light travels, and is observed. There is quite a lot written on this, but experts seem rarely to appreciate that we hitch-hikers might have questions beyond those which they think we should need to ask.

Christopher Baird does quite a good job here:

http://sciencequestionswithsurprisingans...en-the-photons/

and here:

http://sciencequestionswithsurprisinganswers.org/2013/01/16/is-light-a-particle-or-a-wave/

but even he leaves some gaps. Pun intended – sorry.

Yes what I have done is fill in the story of light as best you can in classical physics which Chris in particular did well without invoking QM. That is what is funny with Paul it's sort of the path he has to tread with classical physics to be able to remotely match experimental results and he isn't trying to understand it and caught again just disagreeing because it was me that said it. You worked it out I had switched sides to argue against QM, something I am prone to do and was actually trying to help you attack QM

Ok lets stay with our classical world and I can play a sort of trick around the probability question. The problem with our wave fairytale story is those situations in which the ray or particle behaviour becomes dominant. Lets start with the first two a) lenses and b) how do you actually see an image as a series of dots.

Look at any lense diagram and it draw a series a ray lines repesenting the light (something we say isn't real in our classical wave model). Ok so if they aren't real what can they be, well the best you can describe them is probability lines that light coming in at that angle has the highest probability to collapse. Similarly to see an image as a series of point array sources like on a photograph you construct a ray or particle trajectory back to the source and again all you can do is assign a higher probability to it.

That is where the probability has to be introduced because you need a reason why, you can't and don't see and measure all and every photon from every angle and the ray diagram model becomes accurate.

Now you already know the answer here, in classical physics I can't give you a reason for the probability beyond that you just have to accept it is what it is, sort of like gravity.

So lets play in the other world of QM you have disturbances in the quantum fields which are going to solidify to a particle energy exchange and there are natural restrictions in doing so. For a visualization you normally get one tornado touchdown from a storm cell, occasionally twin twisters but never infinite twisters because there are natural restrictions in play.

The quantization problem is the other side of the same story. In our classical play scene our 3D sphere wave takes on ghostly strange properties that you can sort of attribute anything and everything against. In theory under that classical fairytale we have created there isn't even a reason the phantom wave has to be quantized until the collapse but it does give you the problem what enforces the quantization at collpase. In stark contrast you already know the story in QM the wave remains quantized and enforced at all points in it's life because of the Quantum field.

I have done all the hard work and got you about as far as I can in classical physics it's all downhill from here, and we can't take the classical physics fairytale any further

Its a good thing that I didnt say that I could then isnt it.



at first you said that 8 photons were required.
so now its been reduced to a single photon?



like I said , its a good thing I never said that.



heat orac not temperatures , I added up the heat that is
going into the collector plates to show the heat that can be
extracted from the collector plates.

havent you ever heard of a solar furnace , what I posted
works on the same principle only it doesnt use mirrors.



the temperature at the focal point can reach around 7,000 F
but you will notice that there is more than 1 mirror
because the heat is being drawn away from the focal point
many mirrors are needed to maintain a desired amount of
heat that can be transfered.

the heat would be quickly drawn away if using only 1 mirror.

think of electricity ... batteries connected in paralelle.
and so each mirror can be thought of as being a battery.



your example isnt an example and if you would have studied
a little physics before you started down the path of fantasy
you could easily understand what I posted.

It's was measured at around 6-8 for the human eye it varies between people, perhaps there is somebody who can see only one we can't exactly test everybody on the planet. We can build detectors that can detect a single photon which we was done for our experiments we started out discussing .. the point is who cares and what does it matter.

As Bill S said you can see perfectly well with one eye or two just depth perception changes and you can't tell me if a photon hits one eye or two so the whole discussion was stupid and pointless. Now if you can organize to allowed me to kill a whole pile of people I might be able to stick sensors in there eyes and work out if the eyes of humans work like every other thing in the universe but as I can't lets just call it unknown shall we since it seems so important to you.

There are probably a few other places in the universe I can't actually measure the photon as well and I am happy to mark them as unknown as well since it matters to you so much. How about we stick to stuff we can easily experiment and test.

I am happy to put the human eye where we have equipment, you aren't. The argument can never be settled and who cares and lets move on.


The only interpretation I can put on that is 3000F added 16 times = 48000F in other words you are adding up the temperatures which is exactly how Bill G read it as well.

So lets just say your English failed you shall we and you didn't mean that as you can never be wrong. So what you meant to say was the heat was adding up and fine we all all agree .. so relevance? Your whole post is pointless if I use the proper physics. You show something with 16 magnifying glass that we all agree on ... sweet ... and relevance ?????

I will leave all the rest of the personal attacks on me alone, you really need to learn how to argue without it getting personal

That was my best effort to extend classical physics to explain experimental results ... I thought it was an impressive fairytale. So how about you tell us how good old GOD true physics works according to Paul and explain all the experimental results ... you are strong on criticism and a bit light on any ideas or contribution so far.

You were actually doing such a pathetic job, I crossed over and at least put up a decent defense for ye olde physics. I was rewarded with you attacking it which was pure gold and I enjoyed immensely .. thank you!

Anyhow moving right along from this rubbish.

Now for you Bill S we got to the change in your OP being about the background not the photon itself. So now we have two backgrounds options and now you must make a choice and Lubos gave the best sentence summarizing this I have yet seen


So with the change in our measured photon belonging to the background we now must decide how the background works.

So Red Pill or Blue Pill?

I wouldnt call it pointless or stupid because you stated that
the human eye required 8 photons before the light could be seen.

and you seem to think that the light that enters the eyes
is processed in the same place according to your comment above.

that is not how human sight works.

the light that enters the left eye is processed by the right
hemisphere of the brain and the light that enters the right eye
is processed by the left hemisphere of the brain.

two separate processes , and two separate videos.

that means that either the human eyes as a set require between
16 photons for both eyes to see the flash or 12 photons as you have now changed it to a range of 6-8 photons.

because you claim that once a photon has been detected it cannot
be detected by any other process or object.

so either the photons are entering both eyes and being detected by both eyes or the numbers you gave are in error.

Sorry Paul that is not remotely how sight works in the brain if you are going to make comment at least do some basic reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cortex

The visual cortex is at the back of the head and it's behaviour is interesting. Notice what happens when the brain gets split.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

The point here is doesn't matter which side or how your eye senses this it is only going to register as seeing something with the whole brain in play.

You can't easily distinguish down a photons action in the naive way you are doing because it is a very complex system that requires multiple triggers and stages. It is pointless even trying to discuss this because you lack the basic understanding necessary and it will be like me talking Russian to you.

The only way I can really test what the eye is doing is remove the eyeball from the person or preferably kill the person and stick probes in the eye ... both which I can't do.

You are now doing a Marosz stupidity now, not having a clue how something works and trying to create a theory and relying on the fact I can't test it. I will leave you to dribble on, as I commented many times I don't do stupid discussions about things that can't be tested. I personally think its invisible pink aliens and you can't test them or prove me wrong either.

I will discuss stuff if you pull it out to a system that we can actually measure things in.

heres what I wrote.



heat is energy orac , what I was saying is that even though
the dots were tiny the 16 dots would quickly heat up the
entire 1 sq ft plate through heat transfer.

3000 F converts to 3.1 million joules

and 48,000 F converts to 50 million joules

1 joule = 1 watt

so each of the 1 sq ft plates will have 50 MW
of the suns energy focused on them.

so yeah the heat is additive but the temperature is not
and yeah the heat is energy and the temperature is not

for instance if you heat the plate with a propane torch flame
that has a temperature of 200 F you will be putting 177 Kj of
heat energy into the plate.

if you heat the same plate with 16 of those propane torches
you will be putting 2.8 Mj or MW of heat energy into the plate.

but the temperature of the plate will never get higher than
200 F

thats the type of thing that you missed out on when you departed
down the fantasy highway.

from the wiki page that you posted.







I prefer that over never being right orac.

Relevance ????? To both posts.

Your first post details a long explaination of what you are obviously claiming something we misread. Well two of us did it, so your English failed .. don't blame us. I am not sure why it needed a whole new post to cover this, other than your personal insecurity.

Your second post says each eye goes to there own area. Great doesn't mean you see the same photon on each eye. I put 16 photographic plates around a circle and only one of the plates sees the photon .. yeah that is called an measurable experiment. You answer above settles and clarifies nothing, you have two eyes that have the ability to see a photon and I have 16 photo plates that can see a photon ... same dog. Only I can't actually measure your dog but I can measure the other dog.

Now we are just dancing in circles, you believe the photon is seen by two eyes ... fine I accept that ... I don't care because it can't be tested it's like asking me to believe in GOD as a science.

I don't believe in GOD, the Earth is only 6000 years old, the story of Noah and dinosaurs were on that arc either ... so lets just chalk it up as another thing I don't believe like you do as I can't test any of these beliefs.

If I have to believe in what you do to be right, I am more than happy to be wrong (it's on my byline) .. never assume I care what you think or believe

Anyhow I have had enough of the stupidity and turned off the reply notification. I will check in after to see if there is anything worth discussing posted. For now I am ignoring this garbage I have better things to do with my time, and this has gone Maroszlike.

It may have been that Bill was just agreeing with me because
he didnt dissagree he only made a statement about heat being
additive , which is what I posted the first time before you
jumped in with your gibberish rantings.



so I dont see it as if 2 of you misread it , I see it as though
you didnt comprehend the post.

and that is evident from Bills post below.



surely unlike yourself Bill knows that units of temperature
can be converted directly into units of energy and therefore
that is why he posted his confirmation below



http://www.kylesconverter.com/energy,-work,-and-heat/celsius-heat-units-to-joules

orac you first need to convert fahrenheit to celsius , just
thought I would give you that hint.

http://www.metric-conversions.org/temperature/fahrenheit-to-celsius.htm

you on the other hand bypassed that part of physics obviously
in favor of the imaginary and fantasy that you know and love so
well so it zoomed high above your head unnoticed.

the rest of your reply has no scientific value as it is filled
with more gibberish and patting yourself on your own back.

As the OP of this thread I am sad to see it sliding down an all too familiar incline. There have been some interesting points raised, some since we drifted into talking about light.

Discussions about light and how it travels and is observed often seem to devolve into a tangle from which there is no clear escape path. As an extrication attempt, I am going to start a new thread specifically about waves and photons.

BTW, I find it interesting that Chris Baird seems to be able to function comfortably without conflict between science and his religious conviction.