At 10:45 PM -0500 7/24/01, Jim Choate wrote:
On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
You stated that every photon interacts, loses energy and is re-emitted.
Sure, it has it's momentum changed. Think about it. The photon comes in from one direction and is absorbed/interacts with the atoms. As a result they get re-emitted (reflected) in the exact opposite direction. The point is the photons that get re-emitted ARE NOT THE SAME PHOTONS THAT WERE ABSORBED.
You can't do that without losing something. photons only have one thing, energy as represented in their wavelength. The beam that gets re-emitted is less energetic than the beam that came in. Even if it does have the same phase and time coherence as the incident one. 2nd law of thermodynamics.
You're confusing the intermediate vector boson as the carrier of information with the information itself.
You're gibbering about things you have no clue about. Babbling about "the intermediate vector boson" when you clearly don't even understand high school physics is especially bizarre. Photons are _quanta_, as in quantum theory. Their energy is given by the usual E = hv (v is nu, frequency). They aren't "less energetic" when they scatter (i.e., are reflected). A photon fired at a surface will scatter/reflect with precisely the energy it had when it hit the surface, unless it is absorbed (in which case it knocks electrons out of atoms...the photoelectric effect in a vacuum, thermalized in ordinary solids). This is the essence of Planck's and Einstein's work in the first decade of the 20th century. Photons don't lose a "little" bit of their energy. They either get completely absorbed, aka the photoelectric effect, or they hold _all_ of their energy. Ironically, the key experiment was done with photons of varying energies striking (scattering) off of a metal plate. The photoelectric effect established that a photon only gives up its energy when it is energetic enough to knock an electric out of a orbital. Photons do not "give up some energy" except in this all or nothing way. The only way photons change their (apparent) energy is through Doppler shift, which is really a frame of reference situation. Red shift, for example. (Ditto the Mossbauer Effect, where gamma photons alter energies slightly.) Whether a photon moving through a medium is the "same" photon or a series of absorbed/emitted photons is an interesting topic to discuss. But the one thing we _know_ is that such photons do not "lose energy" in the way you describe. If they did, then blue light would turn into red light. It doesn't. A blue photon is a blue photon is a blue photon. It's not your ignorance of high school physics (or high school math, or high school history, etc.) that's annoying, it's your oracular pronouncements of flawed theory. This is why people call you a crank. --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