Introduction; I am a person of average intelligence and knowledge burdened by the idea that I may have stumbled upon a fundamentally new concept in the understanding of light, but I do not have the wherewithal to dispute or verify my postulation.
I propose that the quantum (photon) is a particle of energy whose geometric properties in transit are related to the relative position of the source wrt the receiver and modified by intervening bodies. In other words,the photon instantaneously touches both the source and the receiver before being released from the source and then collapses into a point at reception.A photon field re collapsing into a point if you will. I suggest the transmission somewhat analagous to a spark when the electric field preceding is strong enough.
Since we can only measure the speed of light at the receiver,we have no way to ensure that the speed of light is constant throughout the journey. I suggest that the back end of the photon deccelerates from instantaneous to the speed of light as we know it, being receivers only.
This postulation could answer some of the problems we have in experiments suggesting that information regarding twin photons travel faster than the photons themselves. It could explain light bending around planets when light has no mass.
It could explain the double slit experiment using controlled individual photon transmission which stlll show an interference pattern after an accumulation of individual hits over time.It would explain the redder shift of more distant objects in space which is presently the basis for the big bang theory. A new understanding of the speed of light over long distances just might allow science to overcome the present conundrum of an earth being older than the universe.
The theory would suggest that a single star in the universe could not shine as there would be no receivers, like an isolated battery.
Until Chronos shows up (and he will, shortly) you’ll have to put up with the yahoos and their jokes. I know this much: Light bends around all gravity fields. That is because gravity bends spacetime, like a ball bearing bends a rubber sheet. Think of a grid on the rubber sheet. All lines near the ball bearing bend, just like all worldlines near gravity bend. Light follows the worldlines, so it bends. I don’t like theories that allow for FTL information transfer: It implies that some things happen instantaneously, and that implies that in some reference frames things happen in reverse time, causing causality violations. Messy. And about an isolated light source not shining: You are putting a lot on the observer here. If we were to light a star, leave it in a parallel universe for awhile, and return, we would find that it increased the average heat of the universe we left it in by a few Kelvins and a spectral analysis would show more He, Li, etc. than we put in, those elements being fusion products. We may not have actually seen it shine, but it did shine.
I know that according to quantum theory it is possible for particles to “appear”. However, it seems to me that whether particles appear or disappear, there is some other effect on the non-quantum world. You would need to be able to prove that there was not a dangerous release of radiations to make your theory plausible.
On a more gut feel level, if your theory is correct, then why are we not surrounded by insane brightness at all times? Since light would appear to originate from all points at all times according to how I read your theory. If you can resolve this problem between your quantum particle and space-time, than you may have a Noble prize in your future.
The main problem is that there is no agreed-upon “now” to two distant objects for observers in different inertial reference frames. Saying the photon “instantaneously touches” both objects before being released is therefore impossible. For any reference frame in which two distant events occur simultaneously, there are an infinite number in which event A happens before event B, as well as an infinite number in which the reverse is true.
Furthermore, I’d like to point out that no information travels faster than the speed of light. The paired-photon experiment does show a connection between the two photons, but no actual information can be conveyed through that connection. Also, I have never heard of anything that implied the age of the Earth is older than the age of the universe. Can you provide a cite?
I’m not sure I understand you. I am not talking about two instantaneous separate events here, which is exactly my point. I am talking about an interaction taking place between the source and the receiver coincident with the complete release of the quantum and prior to the final full transfer of the photon collapsing into the receiver.
I would suggest that you would burn up first of all and the star would fizzle out with nothing to radiate to. The alternative is the big bang. What you seem to suggest would imply the conservation of mass energy does not hold, and I would not be comfortable with that.
To elaborate a bit on the simultaneity problem, suppose that the receiver is moving relative to the sender. In which frame of reference would the “connection” be instantaneous? According to special relativity, you can’t have simultaneity in both frames.
Also, the “spooky action at-a-distance” problem you’re trying to solve isn’t limited to just photons. You can do the same thing with electrons or even uncharged particles; the latter seems particularly out of place w.r.t. your theory since there’s no electromagnetic interacion–not even virtual photons are being exchanged.
I am not talking about a spontaneous creation of a photon. I am talking about an explanation for how a photon is transferred
We are surrounded by radiation of all sorts. The universe is full of background “noise”
I don’t follow you adam yax wrt your statement that I have a problem with my quantum particle and space time. Please explain.
We may have some difficulty with the concept of now with regard to distant objects but we certainly understand simultaneous. At what distance do we discard the concept of one moment in time?
The concept of the speed of light has only been measured relative to the observer. I do not dispute those measurements. I merely suggest that the average speed of the photon which in the beginning of its transit is like a voluminous cloud from sender to observer collapsing into the observer is in a deccelerating mode, limited to the speed of light, a terminal velocity if you will.
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I’m sorry, I can’t. I know I’ve read it several years ago, The earth being 16 billion years old and the universe younger, in Discover magazine. That article also mentioned a river of stars running transverse to the expanding universe. Conundrums of science seemed to be the theme. But I can’t find it or anything else on the net to cite for you. Sorry.
Thanks for posting.
Why would conservation of mass-energy not hold? Stars burn all the time, converting H into He, Li, and sundry others along with massive amounts of energy in accordance with Einstein’s equations. I never implied that the star would be the whole Universe. I said that the star would be sun-sized (G class, if I remember my classifications correctly) in a Universe about the size of the one we live in, maybe a little smaller. My point was this: The fusion would go on happily for an indefinite amount of time (until the star died) even if nothing was there to observe it.
The rest of your post I did not understand. How can you say that you are not implying FTL travel of photons when that is exactly what you said happened? Are you saying that photons exist as a field we are all immersed in? If that is true, how can we get information from it? It would seem that there would be no difference between signal and noise.
One last thing: We discarded the concept of a single moment in time when relativity came around. We realized that time does not exist the same way for all observers, because of the time dialation effects of speed. So one second for me on Earth might be a trillionth of a second for someone on a fast-accelerating craft, or ten years for someone on a piece of the Universe that is not accelerating as fast as Earth is.
Any distance at all, for any short enough amount of time. The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant in all frames of reference. All. Even accelerating ones. This leads to some very unintuitive results.
Suppose you have two events separated by a distance, call them events A and B. Pick an arbitrary frame of reference. Then we can give events A and B spacetime coordinates. Now, if a signal moving at the speed of light in a vacuum or slower could get from event A to event B, then we can conclusively say that event B happened after event A. Likewise, if a signal from B could get to A, then A happened after event B.
However, if such a signal is not possible, then you cannot conclusively say that one event happened before the other. There are frames of reference in which A happens before B, B happens before A, or A and B happen at the same time.
Unless you can provide some manner in which this would affect the universe, it is not open to scientific discussion. I could say that photons really like pistachio ice cream, but unless I give some effect that this would have, no one would care.
I think that this is basicallly a restatement of commonly accepted quantum theory.
A sentence fragment that doesn’t really mean anything.
Seeing as how electric fields are carried by photons, it is rather dangerous to compare photons to electric fields. You can end up having circular reasoning (electric fields act this way because they’re carried by photons, and photons act like this because they are like electric fields).
Well, the uncertainty principle does say that we can’t know for certain what its momentum is. However, for the momentum to change, the photon would have to impart momentum to another particle.
This is ambiguous on several levels.
You don’t explain how this would be.
Perhaps you are thinking something similar to Feynman’s proposal: he hypothesized that what we see as a single photon of energy E going from particlae A to particle B is in fact the superposition of two photons, each with energy E/2. One photon travels forward in time from A to B, the other travels backwards in time from B to A. Both of them go over the same path, so the result is what looks like one photon.