There is no such 'thing' as energy.

a reply to: rickymouse

After five decades, far from requiring an upgrade, the Standard Model is worthy of celebration as the Absolutely Amazing Theory of Almost Everything.

That' a quote from from the end of this link. Enjoy.

theconversation.com...

a reply to: ColinT

Energy is Time.

Timespace, not spacetime.

originally posted by: sapien82
a reply to: chr0naut

I thought you could slow down photons by firing them via lazer beam into a vacuum chamber with cooled gas
that it changes teh properties of photons !

slowing photons

So if you read the article you posted, you will find that it doesn't change the properties of photons at all. The slowing of photons is a stimulated emission and hold in a manner similar to a laser, assuming a highly compressed medium. What they did is make it sound super awesome by bending the truth about what is actually occurring in this case.

Freeze out a bunch of what would have been gas, onto a single point or area in a vacuum system, measure its thickness, and fire a photon or two at it. What they basically measured was a delayed stimulated emission, which is kind of expected in these cases, since the hold time in an excited state would become longer in a ultra cold material. All it really suggests is that... not that the photons they measure are infact the same photons, slowed to a crawl.

Even if they did do that, what you should find them reporting on is the creation of a material with an insanely high refractive index... they don't report on that either... because its not what is happening, and they know it.

But still... people latch onto the sound bites and perpetuate a none-truth.

There is a lot of maths behind these concepts and experimental results and observation. But if the question is what is "energy" in a fundamental qualitative way, this is how I see it :

Mass is a measure of potential energy, energy is the expression of interactions between particles and particles are waves in fields (PBS Space time as great videos in relatively simple but pretty accurate language - PBS Space time)

But it seems like interactions, what makes quantum field "change" or "move" could be philosophically explained simply as "cause". Energy is simply what makes things happen and matter is just the consequence of this cause, essentially "effect. The world is simply "cause and effect" and my two cents is that there is no fundamental essence to any of it, it's just the "mecanics" of cause and effect. Everything is in constant change and change is everything. That's what Wuchang means by the way.

a reply to: WuChang

PBS Spacetime does an excellent job of explaining that the 'c' in E=mc^2 is less about the speed of light(though it is a fundamental metric) and more about causality.

Your description of energy is pretty dead on, though I would say less philosophy and more physics, as causality is well described and it is a fundamental tenet of modern physics.

Causality in Physics Wiki page

a reply to: projectvxn

Thanks, I am no physicist, but I like to read about it.
Yeah, I guess I should say metaphysical. You can guess that I like the oriental (Taoist, Buddhist) explanation of all this. Not in a religious way but in a metaphysical way. Cause and effect arises the question of freewill and consciousness though. But that's another thread.

I have inner G

my inner G is strong like energy

originally posted by: WuChang
a reply to: projectvxn

Thanks, I am no physicist, but I like to read about it.
Yeah, I guess I should say metaphysical. You can guess that I like the oriental (Taoist, Buddhist) explanation of all this. Not in a religious way but in a metaphysical way. Cause and effect arises the question of freewill and consciousness though. But that's another thread.

That's a big can of worms.

I feel that looking at the stars or dealing with electronics is far simpler.

a reply to: ColinT

Last week I was looking at discussions whether time can be reified. Now this.

I am convinced however that just because it is possible to do mathematical operations upon a conceptual entity doesn't turn it into a physical entity.

a reply to: toms54

but the very act of doing the maths on a conceptual entity in turns brings it into reality ?
No ?

originally posted by: sapien82
a reply to: toms54

but the very act of doing the maths on a conceptual entity in turns brings it into reality ?
No ?

Sure, a real concept. Numbers themselves are concepts. Use them to measure something, they still remain concepts.

a reply to: toms54

Sure but hypothetically alot of exotic elements were not found in reality , we had the numbers to show they were possible until we later created technology to discover them!
thus creating a real world entity using maths !
I guess its not what you meant , but still they maybe concepts but without those concepts we cant create very much.
Even geometry maths explains complex geometry without which we couldnt make certain things
isnt it weird how maths explains everything even hypothetical things and if it can be explained with maths then its real ?

thanks anyways I guess I missed the point ha!

originally posted by: sapien82
a reply to: toms54

Sure but hypothetically alot of exotic elements were not found in reality , we had the numbers to show they were possible until we later created technology to discover them!
thus creating a real world entity using maths !
I guess its not what you meant , but still they maybe concepts but without those concepts we cant create very much.
Even geometry maths explains complex geometry without which we couldnt make certain things
isnt it weird how maths explains everything even hypothetical things and if it can be explained with maths then its real ?

thanks anyways I guess I missed the point ha!

The calculations are real but the numbers remain the same value. With time, anyway, people make all these arguments about time changing. The value of a unit of time. How can it? That would make every measure based upon it unreliable, including the speed of light.

originally posted by: sapien82
a reply to: chr0naut

I thought you could slow down photons by firing them via lazer beam into a vacuum chamber with cooled gas
that it changes teh properties of photons !

slowing photons

'c' remains constant, even in a Bose-Einstein condensate.

BEC's are essentially a LASER. Energy applied to the 'gas' is absorbed until a threshold is reached and then the energy is re-emitted.

In the 'slowing light' example, the external laser provides the energy as photons. The atoms of the condensate absorb the energy (usually by boosting the electron orbits further out from the nucleous) and then when the energy is enough that the atomic structure can store no more, it reverts to a lower energy state, re-emitting the energy as photons.

But the full picture is not as clear cut and simple as that. The light coming in is from a laser and is coherent so it has a single waveform and each photon is in step with the others. This mean that dynamic attributes such as frequency and wavelength interact with the properties of the BEC, exhibiting effects such as resonance (standing waves). These resonances themselves can be considered as 'storing' energy, too.

The re-emission of photons means that they also have lost their directional properties and scatter somewhat. While this may be in temporal lockstep with the input coherence, it doesent imply directional coherence.

All in all, the speed of light 'c' is conserved at the individual photon level but the propagation speed of the sum of the photons, through the whole shebang, is slowed.

originally posted by: toms54
The calculations are real but the numbers remain the same value. With time, anyway, people make all these arguments about time changing. The value of a unit of time. How can it? That would make every measure based upon it unreliable, including the speed of light.

That was a somewhat shocking revelation when Einstein's relativity was introduced, because before that time was usually seen as universal. Plenty of people had a hard time swallowing this before you came along, but eventually experiments confirmed this is how nature appears to work.

Your statement about measures of time being unreliable is flawed, because relativity predicts in very quantifiable terms exactly how the passage of time will vary in different reference frames. Therefore, even though time passes at a different rate for GPS satellites than it does on earth's surface, we can calculate what this difference is making the measurements reliable...as you can see by the fact that GPS works pretty well.

Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System

The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.

Also the speed of light doesn't vary, no matter what reference frame you measure from, but many other things do vary depending on your reference frame, such as the "color" or frequency of the light whose speed you're measuring. Again this doesn't render the measurements unreliable because the differences can be predicted so they are known and reliable differences consistent with theory.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: toms54
The calculations are real but the numbers remain the same value. With time, anyway, people make all these arguments about time changing. The value of a unit of time. How can it? That would make every measure based upon it unreliable, including the speed of light.

That was a somewhat shocking revelation when Einstein's relativity was introduced, because before that time was usually seen as universal. Plenty of people had a hard time swallowing this before you came along, but eventually experiments confirmed this is how nature appears to work.

Your statement about measures of time being unreliable is flawed, because relativity predicts in very quantifiable terms exactly how the passage of time will vary in different reference frames. Therefore, even though time passes at a different rate for GPS satellites than it does on earth's surface, we can calculate what this difference is making the measurements reliable...as you can see by the fact that GPS works pretty well.

Real-World Relativity: The GPS Navigation System

The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day! The whole system would be utterly worthless for navigation in a very short time.

Also the speed of light doesn't vary, no matter what reference frame you measure from, but many other things do vary depending on your reference frame, such as the "color" or frequency of the light whose speed you're measuring. Again this doesn't render the measurements unreliable because the differences can be predicted so they are known and reliable differences consistent with theory.

What I was trying to understand is when you say time will vary in different reference frames, are you referring to time or space time. When I see these discussions of altered time they are usually in relation to how things react around compressed space like a gravity well or some situation in which space is altered. So when it is said time slows actually it is the space which is compressed and results in an alteration of space time not time per se. A misleading impression unless I am understanding this wrong.

a reply to: toms54

In your paragraph on GPS: "Your statement about measures of time being unreliable is flawed, because relativity predicts in very quantifiable terms exactly how the passage of time will vary in different reference frames. Therefore, even though time passes at a different rate for GPS satellites than it does on earth's surface, we can calculate what this difference is making the measurements reliable...as you can see by the fact that GPS works pretty well."

You say "time passes at a different rate." Rate of time is different than unit of time as measured by a clock. The rate changes but the units remain. Then the clocks differ and time is dilated. I am not trying to debate the science only understand it. Like I said at first, I am trying to grasp the semantics. Time seems to be used as a kind of catchphrase for different concepts.

I asked for a comment. You have helped me. Thank you for the insight. It will come in handy while I go back to reading.

originally posted by: toms54
What I was trying to understand is when you say time will vary in different reference frames, are you referring to time or space time. When I see these discussions of altered time they are usually in relation to how things react around compressed space like a gravity well or some situation in which space is altered. So when it is said time slows actually it is the space which is compressed and results in an alteration of space time not time per se. A misleading impression unless I am understanding this wrong.

Start with special relativity. That's what Einstein did, which he published first, and it doesn't include any gravitational effects. It took him quite a few more years to work out the gravitational effects in general relativity and that's more complicated.

Einstein likes to use a train as an example, which has nothing to do with space being distorted in a gravitational field, it's just the difference between an observer outside the train and an observer inside the train looking at things differently when the train is in motion, because their reference frames are different. In that example, both observers observe their clocks don't run at the same rate as the other clock in the other reference frame.

originally posted by: toms54
I am not trying to debate the science only understand it. Like I said at first, I am trying to grasp the semantics. Time seems to be used as a kind of catchphrase for different concepts.

Einstein wrote a book for people without physics training to learn about relativity. I recommend that if you haven't read it and want to understand these concepts. It's a free download here.

Page 29 is the start of a chapter "On The Idea of Time in Physics".

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thank you, I downloaded the book and I'm expecting it to give me a more systematic picture than what is possible from short articles.

Summary response after one week.

All physical objects are comprised of atoms. Atoms, individually or in aggregate, are called matter. All matter is visible and revealed to us by light. Some objects are so small as to be invisible to the naked eye, but microscopes can reveal them. Even individual atoms can be seen via light:

www.newscientist.com...

Some objects are so distant as to be equally invisible without instrumental assistance, but in theory could be seen using a sufficiently powerful telescope. There may be a finite limit to this, perhaps the Hubble limit.

All motion is visible and revealed to us by light. It requires two or more observations separated by intervals of time. Some motion is so rapid as to be indiscernible, but is also amenable to instrumental detection, as in the case of strobe lighting. Some is so slow as to require extended periods of observation.

Thus matter and motion are the two fundamental observables of Physical Reality. Light is invisible: we cannot see light, only those objects which emit or reflect it. Matter, motion and light - more generally radiation - existing within space and time comprise Physical Reality.

Energy, momentum, power and so forth are invisible. They always have been and will be because they are not observables: not physically real. They are concepts within the minds of Men, useful in describing and explaining the manifest phenomena of the Physical Realm, but not a part of it.

Those who insist that such concepts are 'things' - manifest realities - are incapable of differentiating between physical reality and imagination, and so live in delusions of their own creating. This insistence is modern mysticism, part of the religion of Scientism that Modern Western Science has become.

The greater the delusion, the greater the anger, arrogance, conceit and conviction of the deluded, as plainly evidenced by many replies on this and other forums.