Attention to detail lacking

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Tue Jul 24 20:35:21 PDT 2001


At 8:24 PM -0700 7/24/01, mmotyka at 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 at 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





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