Relativity of light - light at light speed

JoshNH4H · 2008-05-06 09:27:14

I just meant that it possessed the strangeness of many quantum phenomena, while being is SR's backyard.

pete · 2008-05-14 15:34:12

Hmm.... there seems to be a misunderstanding of relativity. Light speed is always constant, ALWAYS. Everything else is relative. The thought experiment previously discussed in this thread with the two space ships that meet somewhere in space is interesting. You cannot add anything to the speed of light. But if different observers witness the event (light beam) while their respective space ships travel at different speeds, this is not a problem for the theory because time and space are the variables. Every observer lives in her own inertial system with its own time and space. So the speed of the space ship itself is irrelevant. But distances can shrink for one observer while time may expand for the other. Only c remains constant.

With respect to the second thought experiment about the flashlight that shines from one end of the ship to the other. Well, it always takes five minutes for the light to travel a certain distance but the closer our ships gets to c, the more it will shrink, for the outside observer. Again time and space are the varibables not light speed.

And by the way bobunf is entirely right. Special Relativity is classic in the sense that it doesn't require quantum theory. In fact Einstein never really understood quantum theory and he rejected it: "God doesn't throw dice".

dicktice · 2008-05-14 16:07:45

pete wrote: And by the way bobunf is entirely right. Special Relativity is classic in the sense that it doesn't require quantum theory. In fact Einstein never really understood quantum theory and he rejected it: "God doesn't throw dice".
I've often wondered what it was about quantum theory that Eistein didn't understand....

bobunf · 2008-05-14 18:19:50

Erwin Schrödinger (author, ironically enough of the Schrödinger equation and other quantum stuff for which he received the Nobel prize in 1933) had this to say about quantum theory:

“I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.”

He was great friends with Einstein.

Bob

louis · 2008-05-14 20:09:22

It took me a long while to establish that the special relativity theory applies only to bodies that aren't accelerating or decelerating - that's why it's called the special theory because it relates to special conditions. The reason it took so long was that it is never mentioned in primers or popular science books. But for all other bodies i.e. all bodies in the cosmos (!) which are of course accelerating and decelerating all the time relativity doesn't apply.

I was sparked into thinking about this by realising that of course we EXPERIENCE the forces of acceleration and deceleration and so we KNOW if we are moving away from the platform (though for a few seconds it might take the brain a while to notice the forces).

noosfractal · 2008-05-14 21:50:51

I've often wondered what it was about quantum theory that Eistein didn't understand....

Einstein understood Quantum theory very well. He just didn't like the implications. In particular that Bell's Theorem ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_Theorem

... requires that we abandon locality (allow "spooky action at a distance") or counterfactual definiteness (things exist even when you're not looking at them). Most physicists choose to abandon locality, but Einstein didn't want to give up either - and who can blame him?

SpaceNut · 2014-05-17 19:23:41

Adding posts from another topic...

RobertDyck wrote:

There's a simple fact about particle physics that even most physicists haven't come to grips with yet. Particles that travel close to the speed of light behave as an object that has 3 and a fraction dimensions in our 4 dimensional space-time universe. That means they're a fractal. And the closer they get to the speed of light, the more one dimension is collapsed. Electrons and positrons travel closest to the speed of light, so their random nature is most pronounced. If a particle could ever travel exactly the speed of light, it would have exactly 3 dimensions in our 4 dimension space-time universe. The only particle that does is a photon, and that's an electromagnetic wave. But it's a wave for which time has come to a stop inside the wave. Relativity. It's only a wave, but behaves as a hard particle because time inside the wave has stopped.
Physics according to me. I've had physicists ignore me, but no one has been able to disprove this idea.

RobertDyck wrote:

Well, that idea is rather ambitious. I haven't worked out the math, and the concept involves flexible dimensions. During "inflation", the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, higher dimensions would have inflated. Then as the universe expanded, energy stored in these higher dimensions was released, the higher dimensions mostly collapsed into the 4 dimensions of space-time that we know. Birth of a universe. Again, haven't worked out the math, and physicists look at me like a rank amateur. But if I'm right, this uses fractal mathematics to unify General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. That's Unified Field Theory. However, it doesn't explain temporal mechanics, so would leave a new field of physics for others to work out. Some physicists don't want a final theory because that would leave nothing for them to work on. Have to leave something for them to do. When I was a kid, I wanted to invent warp drive. Either be an engineer for NASA, design the spacecraft for the first human mission to Mars, or be Zefram Cochrane. Does it show?

Last edited by SpaceNut (2014-05-17 19:25:52)

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-17 19:51:56

I likewise can't say that he's wrong, but he can't say that he's right. RobertDyck, if you read this, does your theory have any predictions that differ from relativity, and if so have these effects been observed to your knowledge, and if not how could they be observed?

SpaceNut · 2014-05-17 20:05:11

Here is a visual....

As RobertDyck was saying that its a wave but the problem is the measure of the wave is 186,000 miles a second or one foot per nanosecond which is not a frequency but a Wavelength.

Even the basic relationship between mass and energy is known by every schoolboy as E = mc2. The speed of light has been measured 163 times by 16 different methods over the past 300 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum

Notice the table of electromagnetic wavelengths

We also know that while it seems to be impossible to match the speed of light with travel but that it seems possible to slow it.

MIT Develops Metamaterial That Slows Down The Speed of Light

The Controversy Continues:Speed of Light Slowing Down?

So back to E = mc2 here is Frequency to Wavelength to Energy Calculator

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-17 20:29:26

All of that is true, but within the realm of what we know. What robertdyck was proposing is not contained within the current understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics. Just because no physicist has told him that they could prove it wrong doesn't mean that it's right. That requires evidence. A good place to look would be the pioneer anomaly or the galactic rotation problem. If your theory predicts something different from relativity that also predicts these observed results, then you're talking about something worth proposing.

SpaceNut · 2014-05-17 21:53:37

These relations are illustrated by the following equations:

f=c/y where y is the symbol for wave length

f=E/h

E=(hc)/y

where:

c = 299,792,458 m/s is the speed of light in vacuum and
h = 6.62606896(33)×10−34 J s = 4.13566733(10)×10−15 eV s is Planck's constant

Adding in more with regards to harmonics, frequency and wave lengths...

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/sound/u11l5b.cfm

speed = frequency • wavelength
frequency = speed / wavelength

Last edited by SpaceNut (2014-05-18 10:24:09)

RobertDyck · 2014-05-18 02:17:21

Well, a couple things. First, the photovoltaic effect. Dr. Albert Einstein got his Nobel Prize for the photovoltaic effect, not Relativity. Physicists debated Relativity for a very long time before they accepted it. But the photovoltaic effect explains how solar cells work. This says that a photon imparts momentum to an electron when it hits. Momentum is normally calculated as speed multiplied by mass. But in this case it's the speed of light multiplied by a factor. That factor is equal to the energy of the photon converted to mass by E=mc^2. This tells me that photons do have mass. My high school physics teachers said they don't, but they do. Some physicists will say "that's different", but the basis of this argument: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.

A couple of the latest mysteries of cosmology are "dark matter" and "dark energy". But what I'm saying is light itself has mass. That mass creates gravity. Each photon is very small, and it's hard to measure gravitational pull from something that's whipping by at the speed of light. But the fact you find it difficult doesn't mean it isn't there. Now think of how much light there is in the universe? That will account for a lot of the "dark matter". Much of the "dark matter" is just rogue planets, asteroids, comets, dust and gas that are in our galaxy but not part of a solar system. If there's no shinning star, then we can't see it. It isn't some fancy physics, it's just dark. But light itself accounts for some of the mass. When you add all this stuff up, how much "dark matter" is left?

RobertDyck · 2014-05-18 02:32:44

My ideas are based on Relativity. I just apply fractal mathematics, something that wasn't invented until after Albert Einstein had died of old age. I'm sure he would have done this if he were still alive. So the first differences appear in quantum physics. This hypothesis (it isn't accepted so can't be called "theory"), claims speed is the critical thing that causes random behaviour. So the double slit experiment or other demonstrations of random behaviour of electrons should be duplicated by protons when you accelerate them to the same speed. Be careful though, an electron is very light so when it hits at a significant fraction of the speed of light, it doesn't impart much energy. But protons are heavy, so when they're accelerated to near the speed of light, they'll hit hard.

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-18 07:26:59

The reason why photons don't have mass is that they can't have mass. Based on the equations of special relativity, if a photon had any rest mass at all, it would have infinite mass at the speed of light, which it doesn't. Quite simply, it is different, empirically and mathematically.

You haven't "applied fractal mathematics" unless you've actually done math. Have you? If so, were you able to make predictions different from those of quantum mechanics?

Here's something to chew on: This is not the first time I've heard this idea. I had the same one, almost identical, about eight years ago. I dropped it because I couldn't do the math and because I'm not a physicist.

You thought of it and I thought of it. What are the chances a physicist hasn't thought of it? This would be revolutionary, after all. If true, it might unify relativity and quantum mechanics.

I do intend to learn quantum mechanics and relativity, so perhaps I'll eventually be able to tell you for sure if it works or not.

I'm the meantime, amateur physics is not as easy as it used to be. In Newton's day, any suitably intelligent person might have done what he did. Today that's not the case. If you think this is a true hypothesis, do the math and get a paper published. If not, the amateur physicist industry is not something anyone should be proud to be part of.

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-18 08:34:58

Having said that, I don't know that any work has been done on fractal mechanics, and I do think it's an interesting, if arcane, area.

SpaceNut · 2014-05-18 09:03:20

The term fractal is to describe curves, surfaces and objects that have some very perticuliar properties such as space time which is distorted by gravity. It is also the way to seeing simitry of patterns.

For the photovoltaic cell this also explains why the sine of the angle to perpendicular changes the level of power output as that is what fractals would also suggest for a curve.

File:Von_Koch_curve.gif

With regards to dark matter and energy we could look at that as the negative to our own positive universe as in the ends of a dc battery. A simitry to what atoms are with respect to charge polarity of protons as positive and electrons being negative.

RobertDyck · 2014-05-18 09:48:28

My idea implies that a quantum entangled pair of electrons will have a maximum distance. Pull them too far apart and their will be random chance the entanglement will break. The farther they're pulle apart, the greater chance the link will break. However, an entangled pair of photons will not have any limit; they could retain their link across the entire universe.

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-18 11:02:38

Why does that prediction result?

SpaceNut · 2014-05-18 20:26:22

Photons do have mass...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s … ravitation

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question … al-lensing

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-18 20:38:05

Photons have mass insofar as they have energy, but they don't have rest mass. Their energy is due entirely to their wavelength.

Antius · 2014-05-19 07:01:26

Light travels at the 'universal speed limit'. There is in fact nothing particularly special about photons, they just happen to use up all of their 'existence' in the velocity frame, precisely because they have zero rest mass and are in effect 100% energy. A particle of matter can never achieve zero rest mass and therefore by definition, will never be 100% energy regardless of how close to c it gets. Hence its velocity will always be less than c.

Light can in effect break down to particles of lower energy if it is red-shifted.

RobertDyck · 2014-05-19 11:11:44

RobertDyck wrote:

My idea implies that a quantum entangled pair of electrons will have a maximum distance. Pull them too far apart and their will be random chance the entanglement will break. The farther they're pulled apart, the greater chance the link will break. However, an entangled pair of photons will not have any limit; they could retain their link across the entire universe.

JoshNH4H wrote:

Why does that prediction result?

Quantum mechanics does not say anything about any limit to the distance for entanglement. Relativity doesn't speak to entanglement at all. Most physicists have concluded this means no limit to entanglement, of any sort. The fact my hypothesis predicts a limit to entangled electrons but not protons, is new.

In 1935, a paper was published written by Albert Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen. This paper attempted to disprove quantum mechanics. Today that is called the "EPR" paper, from the initials of the three authors who wrote it. It's sometimes called the "EPR paradox". It did so by pointed out a contradiction between two principles of physics, since "locality" was assumed to be true at that time, that concluded that quantum mechanics is wrong. Well, quantum mechanics does work, it's the basis for every electronic device in the world. Since then the principle of "locality" has been proven false, which makes the entire argument in the EPR paper fall apart. Quantum mechanics now talks about "nonlocality". But "locality" was the only principle that set a limit to quantum entanglement. That principle assumed it only worked within an atom, would not work at any distance outside the atom. No reason why, the principle just made an assumption that a principle for an atom doesn't work in the rest of the world. Obviously that has proven wrong. Since "locality" was wrong, "nonlocality" says there is no limit. My hypothesis sets a limit, but there's a reason for it.

RobertDyck · 2014-05-19 11:17:45

JoshNH4H wrote:

Photons have mass insofar as they have energy, but they don't have rest mass. Their energy is due entirely to their wavelength.

That is the traditional view of physics. You asked for something that my hypothesis predicts that is different. You also said

A good place to look would be the pioneer anomaly or the galactic rotation problem.

Well, this is the galactic rotation problem. I'm saying light itself has mass, that mass has gravity, and that affects galactic rotation. The rotation demonstrates there is more mass than can be accounted for by observable objects, that extra mass has been called "dark matter". I'm saying dark matter is rogue planets, asteroids, commets, dust and debris; but also light itself. It's ironic that "dark matter" could be light itself.

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-19 13:16:53

Would you care to spell out for me in mathematical terms how your hypothesis results in the result of light having mass? There are good reasons, which antius has explained, why light cannot have rest mass according to the theories of relativity.

The notion that light cannot have rest mass is also in contradiction of the fact that it disappears when absorbed.

RobertDyck · 2014-05-19 14:20:25

This isn't a contradiction with relativity. Because relativity clearly spells out that mass and energy are the same thing. E=mc^2 where "E" is energy, "m" is mass, and "c" is the speed of light. No constant required as long as you get units correct. But that means when a photon hits something, it is absorbed. Completely absorbed. That's because all of its mass is converted to energy, and that energy is absorbed.

Momentum imparted to an object when another object strikes it, is equal to speed multiplied by mass. That can get complicated if you get elastic collision; if the speeding object bounces off backward, then the momentum imparted is equal to the mass of that object multiplied by the change in speed. That change in speed is its initial speed plus it's final speed. So if a metal ball bearing of say 1 gram strikes a rubber ball of any mass, and if the metal ball bearing was traveling at 10 m/s toward the rubber ball, but departs at say 3 m/s in exactly the opposite direction, then total change of speed is 13 m/s. Total momentum imparted to the rubber ball is therefore 1 gram * 13 m/s. However, if a billiard cue ball strikes a black 8 ball. If the cue ball strikes the 8 ball squarely, and stops dead, the 8 ball will gain the same speed as the cue ball. Assuming cue ball and 8 ball are the same mass. So if the cue ball travelled at 10 m/s and mass of 6 ounces (170 grams), then momentum imparted is 170 grams * 10 m/s.

The photovoltaic effect says the exact same thing happens with a photon. When a photon strikes an electron, it's a non-elastic collision. The photon is entirely absorbed by the electron. The result is a transfer of momentum. That energy is equal to the speed of the photon (speed of light) multiplied by a factor. When calculating momentum of a cue ball, that factor is its mass. When calculating that factor for a photon, that factor is equal to the energy of the photon converted to mass by E=mc^2. That means the energy of the photon is its mass.

The weird thing about a photon is that it has the maximum speed possible from the moment it's created. The very moment it comes into existence, it speeds away at the speed of light. As I just explained, it does have mass. But that mass is not increased by acceleration, because the photon does not accelerate.

Last edited by RobertDyck (2014-05-19 14:21:33)

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#51 2008-05-06 09:27:14

Re: Relativity of light - light at light speed

#52 2008-05-14 15:34:12

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#54 2008-05-14 18:19:50

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#55 2008-05-14 20:09:22

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#56 2008-05-14 21:50:51

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#57 2014-05-17 19:23:41

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#58 2014-05-17 19:51:56

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#59 2014-05-17 20:05:11

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#60 2014-05-17 20:29:26

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#61 2014-05-17 21:53:37

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#62 2014-05-18 02:17:21

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#63 2014-05-18 02:32:44

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#64 2014-05-18 07:26:59

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