Well, I thank you for your faith in my abilities to adduce the one true path to universal understanding on so few clues. However, I have failed you. None of what you say makes it obvious to me where I’m supposed to go. May I explain.
The speed of light is a velocity. It may be an illusion that photons move, but it’s an illusion of velocity. If that’s the point you want to make do so. But that which follows,
your ten proofs, does not conclued that.
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1. The undeniable fact that c has the dimensions of distance divided by time explains all that is known about the times taken for communications over distance. But the fact that all velocities are distances divided by time by no means entails that all distances divided by time are velocities, which would be as absurd as saying that because all bachelors are men, all men are bachelors.
Is there another reason, and you’ve given none, for dividing distance by time unless one is describing speed or velocity? My cousin lives 347 miles away and I‘ve not seen him for 504 hours. That’s 0.688 mph or 1 fps. Ok, it’s not a velocity unless I say "I've been crawling on hands and knees underneath a net from Baltimore for the last three weeks: How fast have I gone?", but otherwise it's just a daft conjunction. Unless you introduce a Daffy Conjunction Principle (DCP) I fail to see how this fits into any argument.
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2. Herman Bondi says: ‘Any attempt to measure the velocity of light isnot an attempt at measuring the velocity of light but an attempt at ascertaining the length of the standard metre in Paris in terms of time-units.’[ ] Also, it has been proved that all the practical consequences of Einstein’s Theory, both Special and General, can be deduced much more simply by adopting Bondi’s interpretation of c as a pure ‘conversion factor’ for interconverting measures in metres into time-measures in seconds [ ].
These two above arguments were aimed to prove that c need not necessarily be a ‘velocity’. The following eight arguments contend that c cannot, logically, be a velocity.
Yes, as the Mars Climate Orbiter attests, it is better to do the calculations keeping all of our units the same; all the girls say yeah. And c need not necessarily be a velocity. And though that doesn’t mean it isn’t, I don’t think this is were the arguments against you are coming from. From where I sit you prefere doing the calculations chock full of obvious adjustments because you come out with obvious answers.
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3. For light to be seen, photographed or detected in any possible way, it has to shine on something. In a vacuum there is, by definition, nothing on which it can shine. So, logically, light cannot be seen, photographed or in any other way be detected in the vacuum of space, which signifies a reduction to absurdity of experiments claiming to have photographed ‘light travelling in vacuo’.
4. To be seen or otherwise detected travelling in a vacuum, light would have to give off light. And that secondary light would have to give off light; and that tertiary light would also have to give off light and so on, ad infinitum, in a logical regress to absurdity.
6. Light is quantised in units of Planck’s constant h. These quanta have been interpreted as ‘flying photons’, claimed to have been photographed ‘in flight’ by Nils Abramson [ ]. However, since the ‘photon’ is defined as a single, irreducible light-quantum, it has no energy to spare in manifesting itself anywhere between its point of emission and point of absorption. A quantum interaction between a pair of atoms therefore has to be instantly consummated, with there being no sensible question either as to where it is or what it does between its source and sink. There are simply no parameters to describe that ‘motion’. Any attempt to photograph or otherwise detect it absorbs its whole packet of energy at that point, so that there can be no question of how it exists or travels when undetected, that is, in vacuo.
I dragged 4 & 6 up with 3 because they’re of a piece. I would agree that the measurement of a photon is a destructive process. That a photon has been photographed in flight is such a silly statement I have a hard time believing a professor in Applied Holography said it to be interpreted as you interpret it here. It would be real nice of you to cite where Nils Abramson said this, or quote him in context so an argument can be made against it. As it stands I smell a straw man working in the quote mines. Please show me (not tell me) I’m wrong.
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5. If c is interpreted as a ‘velocity in the vacuum of space’ (as Einstein’s Second Postulate states), then in a vacuum to what can that ’velocity’ possibly be referred, constant or otherwise? So the concept of light as having a ‘velocity in space’ is just another absurdity.
Are you raising an army of straw men to escort us down the one true path? (Add a few tin men and cowardly lions and I go just so I can battle the flying monkeys. But I ain’t wearing the dress.)
I can time the emission of a photon directed into a vacuum. I can time the reception of a photon coming out of a vacuum at the intended target. I can measure the length of the supposed path of the photon through that vacuum. I can divide P by t
r-t
e, and get something that looks remarkably like a velocity. I can also insert a detector at any point along said path prematurely interrupting the photon at exactly the time one would predict the photon to be at that point; though not before or after. This is a very good illusion.
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7. In order to conform to the law of conservation of energy, the alleged ‘photon’ cannot just hang around unconsummated in limbo, waiting to be absorbed. As Tom Phipps (Jr.) put it, ‘the ‘photon’ sure don’t have a holding pattern!’[ ] So, what is a ‘photon’ when it is supposed to be travelling, say, between galaxies or, as it might be, en route to nowhere? The whole concept is meaningless.
I’m not sure I get this one. What does a photon have to be when it is supposed to be travelling between galaxies. My guess would be that it’s a photon. We have an electron
a in galaxy
a which emits a photon of energy E, electron
a losing said energy E. An electron
b in galaxy
b absorbs said photon gaining energy E. The total energy of electron
a, electron
b, and the photon remains unchanged. I’m sure there’s some really intersting physics in here that would also go toward explaining your POAM theory.
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8. Can light be scattered by light, as some experimenters have claimed? If a powerful laser-beam is shone across the path of another, do their ‘photons’ collide or their ‘waves’ interfere? In a simple experiment devised and carried out at Brunel university, in 1980 [ ], two powerful lasers were beamed across each other’s paths and also shone head-on at each other. No blocking or interference whatever was detected. If any such interference were to take place, then that light would suffer dispersion. Considering the amount of light that is allegedly ‘criss-crossing’ around, it would be amazing if visual acuity were possible over the length of a single metre. All the light that is allegedly shooting around in all directions would be as much a barrier to vision as the densest fog that can be imagined. The fact, then, that there are photographs of the farthest galaxies that display awesome clarity militates against the validity of any such experimentalist claim.
Who doesn’t agree that photon-photon interactions must be exceedingly rare if ever and as cavediver produced the ever with the photon→pair↔photon and his bubble chamber picture an explanation is in order for the empirical evidence being a pov illusion. Your reply seems to have been Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So I think I can fairly settle the issue by saying Is so, from the beginning of the world to the end, padlock, no key.
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9. All velocities, properly so called, obey the rule of the composition of velocities, according to which the velocity of an object is different relative to differently moving observers. But c is, eminently, the same for all relatively moving observers, as Einstein’s Relativity requires and as experiment confirms. Therefore, logically, c cannot be a velocity.
Where does the properly so called rule come from? Logically, the rule of the composition of velocities doesn’t apply to photons. Photon velocities accord with a different rule as they are different from objects with mass.
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10. For a velocity to be a velocity it has to be the velocity of something that is physically identifiable. In physics both ancient and modern, there is nothing that can be physically identified as light travelling in vacuo, especially in view of Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle, which makes the ‘track’ of an alleged ‘photon’ absolutely indeterminate. If we think of what ‘travels in vacuo’ as ‘waves’, then what can possibly ‘wave’ in a vacuum? And if we think of what ‘travels’ as ‘photons’, then if those ‘photons’ travel at the ‘speed of light’, then their mass has to be relativistically infinite at that ‘speed’. The mass of a single photon would be as great as that of the whole universe. To escape this consequence by assuming that the ‘stationary mass’ of the photon is zero — as some physicists have claimed — then how can that ‘zero mass’ be conceived as a ‘particle’? And, anyway, when is a photon ever regarded as stationary, since its alleged ‘velocity’ is c in all observational frames, bar none?
Maybe you should have broken this up into several points to complete your ten instead of making three points out of point 3-4-6.
You seem to be saying here and in 9 that photons should behave like buses or they don’t exist. That we can not identify a photon in the middle of its flight doesn’t mean it doesn't exist. The photon’s wave/particle nature is very odd to be sure, but more than incredulous questioning is required to negate the very useful, current interpretation. For all that I can tell is that you expect the world to comply with your brand of common sense and that the reason that it seem not to is because we’re all looking at it wrong way round. Where I see a lot of You can’t see it from there., I don’t see much Stand over here.
I may be all wrong. I’m wrong a lot. Tell me what a photon is if not a photon.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.
Ernest Hemingway
™ Version 4.2
