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

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


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.


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Originally Posted By: Bill S.
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.

I have no problems with that statement.

Originally Posted By: Bill S.
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?

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?


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Originally Posted By: Bill S.
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

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.

Last edited by Orac; 05/19/16 07:26 AM.

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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?









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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. smile


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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?




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


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.

Quote:
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?


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.


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Quote:
I don’t know where your information about the 8 photons came from


orac

Quote:
This gave me the impression you were suggesting the number of photons reaching one eye would diminish if a second eye were opened.


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 !!!




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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.


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

Bill Gill


C is not the speed of light in a vacuum.
C is the universal speed limit.
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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.



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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.

Last edited by Orac; 05/22/16 02:05 PM.

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


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.


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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 smile

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 smile

Last edited by Orac; 05/23/16 04:23 AM.

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Quote:
Not sure why you think you can collect every photon of the sun, you lost me.


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

Quote:
10 people standing in a circle and you can't even say who is going to see the single photon


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

Quote:
and now you are going to demand you harness every single photon of the sun somehow


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

Quote:
and then you add the temperatures up


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.

Quote:
Hopefully the message sinks in with this example and you stop wasting our time.


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.




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

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.

Originally Posted By: Paul
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

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 smile

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.

Last edited by Orac; 05/24/16 03:06 AM.

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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

Originally Posted By: LM
A way to explain why "background independence" and "background indifference" are morally opposite to each other is to say that "background independence" (or some champions of the term as a matter of dogma) want you to feel guilty whenever you choose a specific background to expand around, in order to describe the physical phenomena. On the other hand, "background indifference" wants you to feel no guilt at all. You are not only allowed to choose a background to describe phenomena – but any choice is just good in principle!

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?

Last edited by Orac; 05/24/16 03:07 AM.

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Quote:
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.


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.


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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.

Last edited by Orac; 05/24/16 01:21 PM.

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Quote:
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.


heres what I wrote.

Quote:
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 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.


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