Choate Prime Physics

Sampo Syreeni decoy at iki.fi
Wed Jul 25 05:53:17 PDT 2001


On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Jim Choate wrote:

>The incident photons strike the mirror.
>
>A current is induced.
>
>That current is electrons moving in a resistor. Making heat, losing
>energy. Note, we are NOT talking about photons here but J/C.
>
>That current re-emits photons that retain both frequency and temporal/time
>related coherence (see Maxwell's Equations for more detail). However, the
>total number of photons MUST be reduced from the incident beam. This also
>means the incident photons can not be the same as the emitted photons.

No. The electromagnetic field, as described by Maxwell's equations, is a
statistical abstraction arising out of quantum electrodynamics, with strict
limits on its applicability. When you try to deal with individual photons,
you're going outside these limits, just as surely as you would be going
outside the limits of classical thermodynamics if you e.g. tried to argue
from the 2nd law in a simple enough quantum system like an isolated
electron. The classical ED only gets you statistical results, and as such
does not allow you to reason about the behavior of individual quanta.
Reflection of light in a mirror happens at a scale beyond the reach of
classical electrodynamics. The only thing that happens is that some photons
are converted to heat, while others scatter as-is.

(Besides, the above stuff is nonsense at its face, as one can clearly see
from the fact that insulators can be reflective, and that an incident
magnetic field does not visibly affect the reflectance of a conductive
mirror.)

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front





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