Speed of Light and Energy...?

[Farsight]

What i said is correct, and is backed by the Einstein references and the experimental evidence. A photon travelling through space has no mass because you cannot change its speed, and it's moving at c, the greatest speed possible, effectively "total motion". An electron is literally made from a photon via pair production, and exhibits mass for the same reason as a photon in a mirror-box increases the mass of that system. Mass is a measure of system energy, essentially saying how much energy is, in aggregate, motionless with respect to you. You cannot engineer a system where the energy is both motionless and in total motion. The electron is essentially a self-trapped photon going round in circles at the speed of light, and thus it cannot move laterally at the speed of light. This is why when we annihilate an electron with a positron, the result is two 511keV gamma photons.


See Wikipedia electron-positron annihilation

[colubridae]

[quote="Farsight"]The simplest body is an electron, think of it as light moving in a circular path at c. If it's going past you, that path looks helical. It can't be going round at c and moving forward at c. It just can't happen.

Why not?

I cannot argue with this…
If you want to call an electron a helical photon



A blank assertion that an electron is literally a photon following a helical path would be a staggering breakthrough in understanding.

My knowledge is blank on this score…

I personally would have expected someone publishing this before now, or why have you not published? Your nobel prize awaits.

Why does the electron-positron/photon interconvert at a specific energy?

[Twiglet]

The simplest body is an electron, think of it as light moving in a circular path at c. If it's going past you, that path looks helical. It can't be going round at c and moving forward at c. It just can't happen.

Why not?

I cannot argue with this…
If you want to call an electron a helical photon



A blank assertion that an electron is literally a photon following a helical path would be a staggering breakthrough in understanding.

My knowledge is blank on this score…

I personally would have expected someone publishing this before now, or why have you not published? Your nobel prize awaits.

Why does the electron-positron/photon interconvert at a specific energy?

Exactly, the reason nobody has published it is because experimental evidence shows electrons have mass. I concor that farsight should submit his ideas for peer review.....continuing to "debate" them further would look good on his CV and bad on mine, as a sometimes wise man once said....

[colubridae]

The simplest body is an electron, think of it as light moving in a circular path at c. If it's going past you, that path looks helical. It can't be going round at c and moving forward at c. It just can't happen.

Why not?

I cannot argue with this…
If you want to call an electron a helical photon



A blank assertion that an electron is literally a photon following a helical path would be a staggering breakthrough in understanding.

My knowledge is blank on this score…

I personally would have expected someone publishing this before now, or why have you not published? Your nobel prize awaits.

Why does the electron-positron/photon interconvert at a specific energy?

Exactly, the reason nobody has published it is because experimental evidence shows electrons have mass. I concor that farsight should submit his ideas for peer review.....continuing to "debate" them further would look good on his CV and bad on mine, as a sometimes wise man once said....

Actually it's way worse. If this pure speculation had even a sniff of a chance, he would be feverishly poring over it by the midnight oil.

Getting scooped before publishing is every frontier scienist's nightmare.

"earth"

[mistermack]

''evidence shows electrons have mass''
My little gyroscope has apparent extra mass when it rotates very quickly.
Why should a photon not do the same? Surely it's electromagnetic waves rotating at light speed that produce the effect we know as '' mass '' ?

[Twiglet]

''evidence shows electrons have mass''
My little gyroscope has apparent extra mass when it rotates very quickly.
Why should a photon not do the same? Surely it's electromagnetic waves rotating at light speed that produce the effect we know as '' mass '' ?

Why not go the whole hog - it's invisible fairies on a pin gossiping... oh wait! There's no experimental evidence to support that theory. Which is what distinguishes science from fantasy.

And um - let me be the first to welcome you to Rationalia

[Farsight]

Papers have been published on this. See Is the electron a photon with a toroidal topology? by Williamson and van der Mark, Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Volume 22, no.2, 133 (1997). There's also The nature of the electron by Qiu-Hong Hu, Physics Essays, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2004. The experimental evidence is there in pair production and annihilation along with electron angular momentum and magnetic dipole moment.

This is no fantasy. The fantasy is that spin is "intrinsic" and that quantum mechanics surpasseth all human understanding . Then it's but a small step to things don't exist until you look at them and parallel worlds. Amazingly, the people who swallow this garbage trot out any old pathetic excuse to dismiss scientific evidence and peer-reviewed papers.

OK Twiglet, you're on. Give us a demonstration.

[Twiglet]

Papers have been published on this. See Is the electron a photon with a toroidal topology? by Williamson and van der Mark, Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Volume 22, no.2, 133 (1997). There's also The nature of the electron by Qiu-Hong Hu, Physics Essays, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2004. The experimental evidence is there in pair production and annihilation along with electron angular momentum and magnetic dipole moment.

This is no fantasy. The fantasy is that spin is "intrinsic" and that quantum mechanics surpasseth all human understanding . Then it's but a small step to things don't exist until you look at them and parallel worlds. Amazingly, the people who swallow this garbage trot out any old pathetic excuse to dismiss scientific evidence and peer-reviewed papers.

OK Twiglet, you're on. Give us a demonstration.

The emphasis isn't on me at all farsight. The paper which you cited, along with the various wikipedia links you quoted contain good science, none of which are supporting a word you say. Latching on to the odd sentence, such as those identifying the inconsistencies between SR and QP is not news. It's widely recognised that the two theories are fundamentally at odds with each other, which is why physicists have been looking for a way to bridge the gaps for well over half a century.

What you are suggesting doesn't bridge the gaps at all, what it does is to fall into some fundamental errors over some of the most basic concepts behind SR. You can't build grand ideas of faulty premises. If the building blocks don't work, the rest won't either.

I started contributing to this thread to help someone out who was trying to understand special relativity, and you started half- agreeing with my explanation in order to entertain a debate, but it has become abundantly clear that you are simply trying to push your pet theory as if I should somehow validate it with you through argument. Your problem is that you don't have a credible argument at all, which is probably why you are left touting it on anonymous bulletin boards to strangers instead of having your work published and winning adulation for unifying quantum theory with relativity.

I'm not seeking to be groundbreaking at all in my explanations, just to explain widely accepted theory at nothing more than a first year undergraduate level. The mistakes you are making over concepts like time dilation are not even at that level, I'm sorry to say. Pasting in slabs of text surrounded by arguments unrelated to their content isn't helping your cause.

Allow me to treat what you say with some credibility after it has been backed up by rigorous experimental data, and published in a peer reviewed journal. After which I look forward to hearing about how you redefined the laws of physics on primetime news. Until then, I'll stick to helping people out in small ways by explaining things according to the conventional wisdom, against which my understanding has been validated by a Masters degree in physics, in which, coincidentally, my specialist areas included Quantum theory, Particle physics and Nuclear Physics. Special relativity was taught as a first year course. I have nothing to prove to you whatsoever.

[mistermack]

Twiglet, thanks for the welcome. And be sarcastic by all means, but try to make it funny or witty. Sarcasm on it's own is just lazy, not worth reading.
I must be missing something here. What is mass then? I thought it can be converted to massless energy. Is that incorrect?

[Twiglet]

Twiglet, thanks for the welcome. And be sarcastic by all means, but try to make it funny or witty. Sarcasm on it's own is just lazy, not worth reading.
I must be missing something here. What is mass then? I thought it can be converted to massless energy. Is that incorrect?

Mass and energy are interchangeable. A good description would be that mass is "frozen energy".

An example of the interchange would be a nuclear reaction, where (in fission) and element decays into smaller (atomic number) daughter elements, and junk (photons, electrons, neutrinos). The combined masses of the daughter elements and particles are less than that of the original, and the small difference in masses is given to the byproducts in the form of kinetic energy and light. Energy for photons is calculated at e=hc/wavelength.

[mistermack]

Ok, so mass can cease to exist. But energy is conserved, and never ceases to exist. If energy becomes 'matter', the energy is still conserved in that matter. Is it not apparent then, that mass is a property that energy can display? A property can exist or disappear, whereas real energy only changes configuration.

[Twiglet]

Ok, so mass can cease to exist. But energy is conserved, and never ceases to exist. If energy becomes 'matter', the energy is still conserved in that matter. Is it not apparent then, that mass is a property that energy can display? A property can exist or disappear, whereas real energy only changes configuration.

Pretty much. Energy can change forms, and one possible form energy can take is mass. That's what E=mc^2 is all about. Reactions conserve energy. Nuclear fission involves the loss of a little bit of mass exchanged for a lot of kinetic energy (typically). That's useful in a nuclear reactor as kinetic energy (heat) is used to do things like heat up water to power turbines and make electricity.

[mistermack]

So if a massless photon was forced into rotation at the speed of light around a tiny radius, it's not that ridiculous to suggest that it might display the property of mass? Maybe not the same mass as an electron, but some nevertheless?
I'm not ashamed to speculate, when most of science at this level seems to be speculation, some more backed up by evidence, some less.
When I first looked at relativity, I just couldn't accept that space was nothing, that no ' medium ' was involved. But everything I read said that this was unequivocally proved.
Now people are talking about space being anything but empty. So I am very 'sceptical' when people try to portray the accepted wisdom as unchallengeable.

[newolder]

So if a massless photon was forced into rotation at the speed of light around a tiny radius, it's not that ridiculous to suggest that it might display the property of mass? 

Hi mistermack,
For the property mass, wiki is okay: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism Mass is attained by those who interact with Higgs quanta. Massless bosons (and possibly supersymmetric fermions) e.g. photons do not feel that interaction whilst things like electrons and quarks do.

So I am very 'sceptical' when people try to portray the accepted wisdom as unchallengeable.

Wisdom is better footed in empirical measure. What does your theory predict for the rest-mass of electrons and how does it arrive to this figure, please?

[mistermack]

Hi newolder, thanks for the links, I'll have a look. And thanks for the promotion, I didn't know I had a theory. My technique for learning is just to poke and prod at things that look odd. I don't have any wisdom to share, I'm afraid. That's why my contribution is just questions, not answers.