As my claim in my old About Me sidebar profile declares, I think that I have the fundamental nature of reality pretty well figured out, and I still stand by that claim. Most of my own practical and logically inspired insight and theorising concerning the nature of creation and physical phenomenon in general are empirically supported by the efforts of others, classical heroes among them, many of whom might no doubt still have a few lingering questions regarding their own interpretation of the results of their experimentation.
One of those theories concerns the nature and the behaviour of light, on which topic I have written about on occasion here and there.
In a nutshell, I maintain that photons as particles do not really exist, nor do such particles shoot across space at the speed of light; that the principle idea put forth by theoretical physicists that photons have no mass is merely a convenient accommodation to explain away their velocity, since relativity theory states that any object travelling at 100% of the speed of light has infinite mass. I describe the propagation of light as the result of atomic and molecular interaction based on like-polar reaction in the medium setting up resonant oscillations conforming to the properties of the surface atoms/molecules that make up the objects that we see, and that all the characteristics of those surface atoms/molecules are modulated on the electron orbitals of all of the atoms/molecules in the medium through which those waves are propagated. As Philip Bucksbaum of Michigan University has proved, the electron is capable of storing an infinite amount of information. This agrees with the explanation of how light waves propagate. The retinas of our eyes decode the information that falls between the extremes of the visible frequencies of those oscillations, but the origins of the original waves that produce those frequencies lie in particles much smaller than the smallest wavelength of visible light. Even conventional optical microscopes cannot resolve most viruses, which are comprised of a million or more atoms. So in effect, we are not even decoding the fundamental frequencies of those oscillations, but rather distant subharmonics of their fundamentals, which idea incidentally also supports Einstein's famous equation E=mc², which states that there is a tremendous amount of energy contained within the atom.
In a previous post I described the technology whereby the effective wavelength of visible light was reduced to about 8% of its normal wavelength while the frequency actually remained the same, in my discussion of a field of research called plasmonics.
Using an altogether different technology, scientists have now managed to illuminate very small objects like viruses by using a special lens to focus a 500 nanometer beam of visible light down by a factor of ten to a beam about 50 nanometers in diameter. The principle is called superlensing, and involves constructing a transparent plate on which opaque circles are arranged concentrically in a specific pattern. A beam of light passing through it dies very quickly, halving every 5.5 nanometers away from the plate for a 50 nanometer beam, but that is moot considering that the applications of the phenomenon fall in the nano scale realm, well within the capabilities of current nano-fabrication technologies.
All these new developments only serve to bolster the gradual paradagm shift. No longer do research physicists mean particles when they talk about photons. We now refer to "photon wavelengths" when talking about electromagnetic radiation.
The most lucrative potential application of superlensing technology is in the development of even larger storage capacities for DVD's and compact discs than now exist, which are currently limited by the size of the laser dot used to encode the individual bits.
I foresee a future of strange supercomputers incorporating all the cutting edge technologies of quantum computing, plasmonics, and superlensing whose computing speeds exceed even those of real-time quantum and biological behaviours. Only then will we be able to seriously consider investigating the art of the coincidental juxtapositioning of spatial co-ordinates within the fixed framework of space/time - ie. the teleportation of life-sized objects in this macrocosm.
Beam me up, Scotty!
Monday, January 21, 2008
And they said it couldn't be done!
Inviting controversy - exceeding light speed
The noted Italian astronomer Paolo Maffei states in his excellent book "Beyond the Moon" that if our neighboring galaxy Andromeda (2.9 million light years away) were to explode, we would feel the initial shock wave within a couple of days of that event. Obviously then, shock waves originating from colossal events propagate faster than ordinary electromagnetic waves. We will acknowledge for the sake of argument, as suggested by Maffei, that the density of intergalactic space is in the order of one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter. Given that the rate of atomic interaction determines the rate of propagation of EM waves, then the distance travelled by an EM wave front for a given time frame is proportional to the number of particles in the medium which effect their transmission for that distance. We can do a logical calculation with respect to the actual distance that a light wave would travel through intergalactic space for a given time frame using data compiled for the values we have collected from experimentation at one atmosphere of pressure at 1G, or, on the surface of the earth. The medium of the atmosphere is much denser than the medium of space. Experiments to determine the speed of light were performed in a breathable atmosphere. The statement that "the speed of light" in vacuum is 3x10^10 cm/sec is therefore an assumption.
As a matter of fact, we can use Avogadro's number and the gram atomic weight of hydrogen to find the number of atoms in one gram of hydrogen, and its density of 0.08987 g/L to calculate the total number of hydrogen atoms aligned along a one cm line at one atmosphere of pressure and 1G of force. This yields 37.728 x 10^5 atoms/cm which when multiplied by the rate of EM wave propagation in an atmosphere, which is 3x10^10 cm/sec, gives us the distance that light waves propagate in intergalactic space in one second. This is 1.132x10^12 km, at a rate which is measured as being 3x10^10 cm/sec at 1G and 1 atmosphere of pressure. That's 1.132 terakm!
To argue that light waves travel 300,000 km in one second in space or on the ground is ludicrous. All experiments with respect to EM wave behaviour show us that they travel slower in a denser medium. In fact, in diamond, the optically densest medium, the rate of light wave propagation is half the rate measured for air.
This leaves one to wonder just what exactly Einstein meant when he stated that nothing can exceed the speed of light wave propagation. Based on logic alone we can assume that since low frequency waves travel slower, eg. sound waves, that the higher the frequency, the faster the rate of propagation, so it follows that gamma waves travel faster than light waves. That is also logical with respect to the rate at which particles in the medium interact. They would respond much quicker to a faster rate of oscillation. It could be argued that sound waves are not EM waves but that doesn't remove the logic unless we argue that atomic interaction has no influence in the propagation of EM waves. We can counter that argument.
X rays are produced in the lab by the bombardment of an element with a high energy electron beam. The electrons of the target atoms are stripped from the nucleus in this violent process. Max von Laue's observations of the behaviour of X ray diffraction in crystals in 1912 proved that X rays are light waves of very short wavelengths. In 1914 the English physicist H.G.H. Mosely discovered something very intriguing when he studied the X rays produced by different metals. Each element produces several wavelengths of X rays, but for the sake of our discussion we are here concerned with the strongest emission for each element. He discovered when he graphed the atomic number of an element against the square root of the observed frequency of the X ray emission that there was a linear relationship. In fact, all the points in the X-Y graph lay on a straight line. In other words, there was a direct correlation between the square root of the frequency of the X rays of an element and the number of protons or electrons in one atom of that element. The frequency of an X ray is a function of the mass of the nucleus of the atom which emits it and its propagation is the result of the interactions of stable nuclei. If we scale the nucleus of an atom to the size of a golf ball, then the outermost electron is about 12 kilometers away. These are roughly the proportional characteristics represented by the difference in the dimensions of the nuclei and an atom's overall dimensions, and the frequencies of X rays and light waves.
We can conclude then that the rate of light wave propagation is only an arbitrary number resulting from the calculation of the rate of particle interactions over a measured distance within a time frame of the medium represented by the components of the atmosphere found on Earth at about 1G and 1 atmosphere of pressure, and that this is not the case for all EM wave propagation in any medium.
