At 8:24 PM -0700 7/24/01, mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
You stated that every photon interacts, loses energy and is re-emitted.
I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam. Your blurb about absorption and cascades is only true for some fraction of the lost photons that constitute the inefficiency of the mirror. Others have a different fate.
Maybe that's what you meant but you did say "every photon."
And here's an exchange with Tim :
....
So if we're going to discuss physics let's do it with a bit of care. Maybe it will be more interesting. I'm no expert but I'm willing to try.
Yawn, Mike
Yawn, indeed. Arguing physics with Choate is even worse than arguing math or history or law with him. He has peculiar notions of what energy, mass, reflectance, and a hundred other physics concepts are. Consult the archives for dozens of examples. Photons hitting a surface most definitely do not "lose some energy" and get "re-emitted." There are some very particular configurations that can act as wavelength doublers, but this is a particular, and hard to set up, configuration. Photons hitting a mirror either are re-emitted with the same energy as before or interact via the photoelectric effect and are thermalized (converted to phonons). That colors are preserved in mirrors, absent tints (special absorbers), is a Physics 1 clue that mirrors do not downshift photon energies!. I had a technician who once worked for me who had the same idiosyncratic grasp on physics concepts. Now I don't expect techs to have physics degrees, but I _do_ expect them not to develop their own personal notions of what a "semiconductor" is, or what a "Fermi level" is, and then reason with great confidence from these flawed concepts. My tech used to do just this. He even "corrected" some of the equations in the copy of the book he'd asked to borrow fro me, Andy Grove's "Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices." I told Frank, my tech, to knock it off, and to NEVER deface one of my books with his weird notions of how physics ought to work. I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what "mass" and "energy" and "group velocity" and so on are. All the best cranks view the world this way. I don't know Choate's educational background, but I would not be at all surprised if he is self-taught and moved into computers out of some technician training school. (Not that college physics is needed. When I was in high school I knew enough about physics and math not to have made some of the boners Choate has come out with.) --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns