Binding photons together slows them down and gives them mass.

This thread has aged well! Early on there was a lot of fumbling around, so I stopped reading at the end of page 1. But with all the activity I returned to it today, and I see that as of about the bottom of page 3 it has stumbled its way to the aether:

a reply to: muzzleflash

Oh and for light to be massless than logically that is the wave in a luminiferous aether concept.

The aether is a topic near and dear to me. S&F for this thread, and I've prepared some additional comments which will now soon follow.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

I think there has to be some kind of aether. The preferred term these days is Quantum Vacuum.

So here is my idea: The aether exists. It has ground-state non-zero mass.

I believe the aether may indeed exist. It may have mass, although in my modeling of it one component has positive mass and the other has an equal and opposite negative mass. Starting from some simple assumptions, I have rigorously derived Maxwell's Equations, as you can see here.

a reply to: moebius

This is an experiment with photons in a nonlinear medium. The 3 bound photons are so called solitons. They use effective field theory to describe the behavior. This means they treat the photons as particles with an "effective mass" having an "effective attractive force". Effective is the key word here. The photons don't become massive or anything. It is just that their behavior in this medium can be approximated as massive interacting particles.

This doesn't change or affect the standard theory in any way.

Thank you for this excellent synopsis.

a reply to: galadofwarthethird

Has anyone seen electrons and protons under a microscope ever?
And we still have not even ever seen an photon, even though technically that is all we ever see or are even capable of seeing

We see the interactions of the elementary particles. In ye olden days of yore, there were devices called bubble chambers. If you put a magnetic field on it you could see bubbles form in a curved track, as (postulated) particles would add enough heat to form the bubbles. (The postulated particles came from accelerators or cosmic rays.) Sometimes the tracks would split in two. When that happened, physicists postulated that one particle had split in two. From the curvature of the tracks, things like mass and charge could be inferred. While not "seeing" things directly, it was pretty close, and all experiments agreed with the postulate that indeed it was particles causing the bubbles.

Later, tubes were filled with gases so that sparks would form as particles went through them. This had the advantage over the old bubble chambers in that the signals cold be amplified and sent to computers to do in-flight analysis. Lead sheets were put between the gas tubes to slow the particles down. Magnets were still used to bend the particles. I've lost track of things in the last decade and a half from the detector side, but I suspect things are still fundamentally the same today.

So while we don't actually "see" these things, what is done is not at all far removed from seeing. And my response ties in well to this one:

a reply to: mbkennel

Well, mass, and every other physical quantity, is measured by its apparent effect on other things.

Well said, mbkennel.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: glend
a reply to: ErosA433

originally posted by: ErosA433
The real issue with calling something aether is that it is re-inventing or re-using an old term. That in itself isn't so bad if it wasn't for the massive amount of ignorant abuse that would flow from that.

Einstein himself didn't have a problem with referring to the space-time of general relativity as "new aether", which he said had different properties than the "old" or "luminiferous aether". Of course Einstein's "new aether" term never stuck which is just as well because it would now be over 100 years old and not so new any more. I think the reason it didn't stick is for the reason you said of re-using an old term which meant something different in the sense the luminiferous aether had different properties than the new aether. So what's wrong with calling it "space-time" as we do now?

And quoting mbkennel

If you want to call 'the aether' the electromagnetic field which exists in all space & time, then what you say appears to be correct, but it's better to call things by what other people know them to be and not a distinctly misleading name.

Field or space-time are fine. In my view, aether should remain a reference to the luminiferous aether of the late 1900's.

If you're still convinced that's somehow impossible, feel free to measure and prove to everybody there really is a medium for the EM field like luminiferous aether that Michelson-Morley didn't find, nor have numerous experiments since. It was obviously a popular idea over a century ago, but the fact it's never been found since says something to me. At what point and after how many failed experiments to detect luminiferous aether does one finally accept that it may not exist and that EM radiation seems to propagate just fine without it?

feel free to measure and prove to everybody there really is a medium for the EM field like luminiferous aether that Michelson-Morley didn't find, nor have numerous experiments since. It was obviously a popular idea over a century ago, but the fact it's never been found since says something to me.

We proposed to do a group velocity equivalent of the MM test for 50 thousand dollars using some femto second lasers back in the 90's. The NSF gave us two F's and a D when you needed straight A's to have a shot at funding. The opinion was that relativity was so well proven that there was no need to look anymore. (Even though this would have tested nature in an entirely new way.) I had given a talk on this at the SSC, and about a third of the theorists agreed that it just might be possible that we'd get a non-null result.

So there is another test that could still be done.

My proposal was that the mirrors are forcing the electric fields of the light to be zero at the mirror surfaces, and that is what leads to the null result of MM. The MM apparatus is enforcing a node condition at both ends of both arms of the MM apparatus. If you do the math, such a node enforcement results in a condition where the lightwave is changed in such a way that the null result of MM is expected, even with no length contraction. If however, you use extremely short pulses, you might get a different result when looking at light intensity instead of interference fringes.

a reply to: delbertlarson

I have a similar idea, that photons have self cancelling ground-state mass of the medium.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

Here is a quote from the article.

"They found the photons emerging on the other side were strongly bound together with one another in groups of three, and had actually acquired a very small amount of mass (equal to just a fraction of the mass of an electron). As a result, these photon triplets moved 100,000 times slower than the speed of a normal photon, which travel at 300,000 kilometers per second."

When I first read the article i thought "photons emerging on the other side" meant they exited the medium. I believe this is misleading. The photons would not be able to exit the medium with mass and travel 100000 times slower than light in a vacuum.

a reply to: mbkennel
Oh wow. I was hoping for a picture of a photon, but you gave me an explanation, using words, you are a strange fellow.

But anyways, now. I am thinking. Forget a photon, who wants to see a picture of one anyways, besides, its kind of hard not to see them anyways. Now I want to see a picture of these, what you wrote in your post, especially a picture of this positive momentum and positive energy thing. Also zero mass, should be pretty easy to take a picture of that.

A photon (in vacuum) is a great example of something with positive energy, positive momentum, and zero mass.

You should start a thread dude. You know, posting pictures of all these scientific conundrums, and people would be like. Oh so awesome. You got to remember the moto of ATS, people seem to forget. Pictures or it did not happen or does not exist. You would not want to lest science down now would you?

And after you post that picture of a photon, and this positive momentum energy. Why we can all sit around and debate if it is CG or not. You know a good ol fashion ATS thread, haven't had one of those in years. Why even I would take those pictures put them up on my screen, right next to a picture of Bigfoot. and ask myself, now which of these is fake and which just CG or concept artistry?

And well if your pictures wins that contest of having credence over bigfoot and is actually not CG. I may even think on giving your theory some credence. It would be totally awesome. But I got to tell you, I think bigfoot will win that little contest.

Ah just messing with you a little, but seriously if you have a picture of any of those you should post them.

a reply to: delbertlarson

Your talking about this thing? Seems pretty cool. And I am sure you can deduce some things from it, if one wanted to.

I've lost track of things in the last decade and a half from the detector side, but I suspect things are still fundamentally the same today.Text

You sure about that? This fundamentally thing? What if there like this elusive photon, you know both a wave and a particle depending on what one wants to see. And while it may give you a gander into things by measuring something else by its effect on something, in the end you still just observing that something that is effected. So saying your measuring something in this indirect method. Does leave room for gaps, and not only in knowledge.

But anyways, I was just here for a picture of a photon, as there is none, I must mozy on along on this site.

originally posted by: BELIEVERpriest
a reply to: Arbitrageur

And what about the Casimir Effect? Doesn't that imply a ground-state medium does indeed exist. Maybe it doesn't have all the qualities that Michelson and Morley were looking for, but if they had been alive to witness the Casimir Effect, what would they have said?

They would have said "Fascinating, yes, quantum mechanics is insane, but that's totally different than what we were looking for, and it doesn't make propagation of photons non-isotropically invariant."

originally posted by: galadofwarthethird
But anyways, I was just here for a picture of a photon, as there is none, I must mozy on along on this site.

They "look" like weak electromagnetic waves because that's what they are. They're pretty in waveguides.


slideplayer.com...

A 'photon' is a thing because the "volume control" on the amplitudes of the modes is discrete and not continuous like Maxwell physics.

It's more complicated because with QM there are wavefunctions of the fields (so even though the amplitudes of the quantized electromagnetic fields photons may be like sqrt(1*h*f) and sqrt(2*h*f) (square root of energy) and nothing in between, you could be in a quantum mechanical state which is a 50/50 mixture of the two, which is different from a mode in between which doesn't exist.

a reply to: galadofwarthethird

I was hoping for a picture of a photon...a picture of this positive momentum and positive energy thing. Also zero mass, should be pretty easy to take a picture of that.

You won't get a picture of momentum, nor energy, nor mass.

Mass, energy and momentum are not physical entities by themselves. Rather, they are attributes of entities. A photon, or an electron, or a proton, or your car, are entities. Entities can have mass, energy and momentum. You can measure attributes of entities, like the electrical energy going into your home, which is an attribute of the electrons sloshing back and forth in the wires bringing your power in. You can even get billed for your energy use. But you can't take a picture of the energy. You can take a picture of your electric bill, or the position of the dial of a ammeter measuring current flow (which when multiplied by the voltage of your service gives you the time rate of energy used) but you can't take a picture of the energy itself. But despite the fact that you can't take a picture if it, pretty much everyone agrees that energy does exist as an attribute.

A picture of a photon is a bit more complicated, and you can't technically see one of those either. While a photon is a postulated entity, and not just an attribute of an entity, a photon also has the condition that it is an entity with a specific attribute: a photon is an entity with a specific central energy and momenta. (Via quantum mechanics, there is also a spread of energy and momenta about those central values for any physical entity.)

Our eyes use light to see. So a picture requires light bouncing off of the picture (or emanating from it, like pictures on our computer screens) in order for us to see the picture. To get the picture in the first place we must image the object by bouncing things off of the object or having things emanate from the object, and we must then process those bounced/emanated things into some form (like a photograph, or a bitmap) which also involves bouncing or absorption. For the case of a photon, you just have a single entity of light. Now you see photons all the time - in fact that is what you do see. But each interaction of a photon with your retina gives just an extremely small amount of information to your brain.

Asking to take a picture of a photon is asking to have many photons (or other detecting particles) bounce off of that photon in order to render an image. But if the photon itself is in the visible range, then bouncing other visible photons off of it will lead to a situation where you almost completely destroy what you are trying to measure during your attempt to measure it. That is because the photons you bounce off of it will have a similar energy and momentum to the one you are trying to "see" so it will scatter away before you get enough light reflected off of it to "see" it.

However if the photon has very high energy then you can, sort of, take a picture of it. You can do so with a bubble chamber. Just google "picture of gamma rays in bubble chamber" to see many such pictures. In that case, you scatter a very high energy photon off of material in the chamber. Now technically, each interaction producing a bubble will destroy the original photon since energy is lost to make a bubble and that energy comes from the original photon. Once energy comes out of the individual photon you technically get a new photon, now with a slightly lower energy. But that might be close to what you are asking for.

Of course, since a photon is a particle with a well-defined energy and momentum you never truly observe it in any way (including taking a picture) without altering it. Observation requires interaction, and any interaction involves an exchange of energy or momentum, and when the exchange is made you get a new photon (with different energy and/or momentum) and no longer have the original one.

Well I suppose that is one interpretation of any and all such observations. A gap in knowledge does leave much room for interpretation. Or interpretations if one so choose to do so.

But anyways, it is nice to see one refute there previous statement by there current statements. And so the double photon just became what? Observable? Ah, what else can we see all the day long but photons, and sometimes at night as well.