"Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@netzero.com> wrote in message
news:1167662677.623960.238000@s34g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

theory
of light.

But what is this mysterious "photon theory" everyone talks about so
confidently. Can nobody tell me? Is that a new name for QED, for
half-baked just-so stories one sometimes hears about "photons", or
something else?

Nothing mysterious at all. Photon theory is simply the gauge boson part
of QED from what I gather.

The trope here is parallel to the trope about "Lorentz aether theory"
and relativity (the former maps to classical EM in this analogy). It
is conventional to speak of Lorentz aether theory as a discredited
alternative to special relativity, with an either/or quality: it must
be one or the other and Lorentz lost.

I think only the assumption of a prefered absolute frame really lost.
It is no secret that I support a Dirac-like Sea scenario. Only modified
sufficiently so that it could work. It requires a relativistic medium.
----------

Well, not quite, in my book. Lorentz's work is not completely
adequate, perhaps, but it includes a point of view which, as Bell
might
have said, included ways of thinking which were right now dumped in
the
rubbish heap alongside ways of thinking which were wrong. Similarly,
taking Marty at his word (quantitative explanations of phenonena
purported to be evidence for photons available in classical EM), I
doubt this way of thinking need be regarded as in contest with "photon
theory", but rather may be a reminder that classical theory extends a
little farther than we might believe -- a way of thinking which we
have
been a little too quick to discard.

Perhaps so. For me classical-quantum is a duality. One will not exist
without the other. Does it go all the way down? Me thinks maybe so.

The problem is, as a species, we just are not that bright. It's
amazing between feeding, fighting and reproductive behavior we can
manage any kind of abstract understanding. Oh sure, we're much
smarter
------------------

than the dumb apes, but I wouldn't go beating my chest about it.

Well, we do seem to have the ability to get smarter.

FrediFizzx

b...@eskimo.com wrote:
Regardless of whether QM is entirely wrong, atoms _are_ really _like_ tiny
radio transmitters emitting spherical dipole radiation. See, for example,
the usual derivation of natural line width (eg, Hecht)

Psst! A nice heresy is non-zero photon rest mass.

Has anybody indicated how the ultraviolet catastrophe is to be avoided
with a purely classical field? This has to do with energy density
stored by the field, and not with its interaction with matter.

BTW... I don't mean to be overly cantankerous. I'm excited to discover
the "energy sucking antenna": it's features are weird, yet familiar,
and may be relevant to the absorption of radiation by atoms. You may
want to find a nicer name, though. Ugh.

nature has no duality it has unequivocal processes and laws
and means not knowing and understanding the phenomenon to
scratch.

ps thank God and Google for their wonderful spell checker......
i was looking for it for years..

"Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@netzero.com> wrote in message
news:1167662677.623960.238000@s34g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

But what is this mysterious "photon theory" everyone talks about so
confidently. Can nobody tell me? Is that a new name for QED, for
half-baked just-so stories one sometimes hears about "photons", or
something else?

Nothing mysterious at all. Photon theory is simply the gauge boson part
of QED from what I gather.

Y.Porat wrote:
nature has no duality it has unequivocal processes and laws
and means not knowing and understanding the phenomenon to
scratch.

Nature has no laws, only wrays (rules), no constants, only parameters.

ps thank God and Google for their wonderful spell checker......
i was looking for it for years..

I killd God. You can't thank it.

-Aut

Autymn D. C. wrote:
Y.Porat wrote:
nature has no duality it has unequivocal processes and laws
and means not knowing and understanding the phenomenon to
scratch.

Nature has no laws, only wrays (rules), no constants, only parameters.

If the fine-structure constant is a parameter, why is it called a
constant?

Fred Diether wrote:

"Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@netzero.com> wrote in message
news:1167662677.623960.238000@s34g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

...

But what is this mysterious "photon theory" everyone talks about so
confidently. Can nobody tell me? Is that a new name for QED, for
half-baked just-so stories one sometimes hears about "photons", or
something else?

Nothing mysterious at all. Photon theory is simply the gauge boson part
of QED from what I gather.

In other words, whatever we can glean from QED concerning the behavior
of electromagnetic fields. Not some words someone might say over
experimental observations suggestive of "light having a particle
nature". I wondered if there were something else.

...>------------------
if i would have to guess

Fred Diether wrote:
"Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@netzero.com> wrote:

But what is this mysterious "photon theory" everyone talks about so
confidently. Can nobody tell me? Is that a new name for QED, for
half-baked just-so stories one sometimes hears about "photons", or
something else?

Nothing mysterious at all. Photon theory is simply the gauge boson part
of QED from what I gather.

In other words, whatever we can glean from QED concerning the behavior
of electromagnetic fields. Not some words someone might say over
experimental observations suggestive of "light having a particle
nature". I wondered if there were something else.

On Dec 28 2006, 11:46 am, "Timo A. Nieminen" <t...@physics.uq.edu.au
wrote:
b...@eskimo.com wrote:
Regardless of whether QM is entirely wrong, atoms _are_ really _like_ tiny
radio transmitters emitting spherical dipole radiation. See, for example,
the usual derivation of natural line width (eg, Hecht)

Yes, but this fact is not stressed in undergrad texts, and since
physicists were once undergrads, the professional community is the
lesser for it.

The conventional mental image of lasers, of stimulated emission, is of
populations of identical photons rather than a "classical laser"
emitting superposed waves.

(Only heretics like Willis Lamb insist on
writing papers about lasers explained purely classically.) Also, most
people act like the collision area of particles is a big mystery (where
particles intercept more light at a resonance frequency,) and the
papers explaining details of how this works *weren't* written in 1880
or 1925, but instead in 1985. From the standpoint of radio circuitry,
the explanation is obvious.

Also, nobody discusses the intense
radiation field which must exist in the 200nM nearfield region of
atoms, fields which should produce mechanical forces and have major
consequences for atomic bonding and for biochemistry. Only in the last
couple of years this is being explored by the AFM people, who found a
great mystery: "friction" between surfaces spaced 20nM apart, where the
surfaces contain doping atoms having narrow band absorption lines. If
we all thought of atoms as little antennas or RLC circuits, effects
like these would be predictable, and perhaps would have been researched
before STMs were invented.

Which all leads me to suspect that the next perhaps minor revolution in
physics will involve discarding the particle picture of light at the
atomic scale, and seeing it as identical to radio waves. If the
presence of Willis Lamb papers, as well as the "non-contact friction"
experiments are any guide, this revolution is already happening.

Psst! A nice heresy is non-zero photon rest mass.

Ooooo, weird. Einstein spins in his grave (or instead perhaps is
finally vindicated, since he was always suspicious of SR/GR and thought
that it might have flaws nobody could see.)

What would it look like
if you had a bottle containing a dense fluid of cold, slow photons?
And does this mean that electrons around atoms are metastable, and
there are infinite numbers of lower energy states?

Timo A. Nieminen wrote:

Psst! A nice heresy is non-zero photon rest mass.

Why would one think that?

A nice review of the state-of-the-art is:
Tu et al, 2005 Rep. Prog. Phys. 68 77-130.

harry wrote:

Different people mean different things with "photon". Typically, it means
"particle" in the USA but "wave packet" in Holland.
Similarly in France I know peope who are working on "photons and
phonons",
and probably they don't claim that phonons are particles.

Neat. I had forgotton about that. How far does the parallelism go?
If phonons are quantized modes of the vibrations of solids via a
precisely similar development which leads to photons being quantized
modes of the electromagnetic field, we should perhaps look for "quantum
spookiness" in the behavior of sparse sound, and either find it just as
spooky as single photon interference experiments, or else notice just
why exactly we don't find it spooky.

harry wrote:

Sorry but.. if you were right then you could file for a fantastic patent
that tells all the radio engineers in the world how to get rid of their
annoying antennas

Lol. You're wrong, he's right, and engineers have known about this
effect for over a century, since the original radio experiments around
1895. It's public domain: unpatentable.

Go look at antenna textbooks, in their section explaining the origin of
EA or "effective area" of short antennas. (Ask yourself this: how
large is the EM shadow being cast by an antenna where the antenna
length << wavelength?)

Go look at the recent "towerless" AM radio stations which use a high
power resonator in place of a hundred meter vertical tower.

Go learn how those resonator-powered RF tags work. By tuning its
receiver coil to resonance with the transmitter, a very tiny RF tag can
intercept far more transmitted energy than it could if it's coil was
treated as an untuned, non-resonant transformer secondary.

Or go look at any simple AM pocket radio. Notice that the required
250-meter halfwave antenna is missing? It's inside the radio, in the
form of a ferrite-core coil. That's no simple transformer coil either,
not a "magnetic pickup;" instead it's part of a high-Q resonator being
tuned by the multi-section tuning cap.

As part of a resonator, the
antenna-coil creates a large current which is in sync with incoming EM
waves, and so produces a volume-filling "scattered wave." The
scattered wave creates a large interference pattern surrounding the
tiny radio, and this pattern creates a downstream EM shadow
approximately a half-wavelength in diameter. That shadow is WAY larger
than the radio itself. That shadow represents the significant energy
being absorbed by the antenna: it's the "effective area" of the tiny
antenna.