Ideas About Photons

Photons are an interesting topic. Einstein won a Nobel in 1921 for the photoelectric effect. He should have won another two for the special and general theories of relativity obviously. My ideas about light vary according to what I have been reading recently. Unfortunately I have read a couple of books on Afghanistan and Pakistan most recently and thus am lamenting the political reasoning deficits the U.S. Government has in making foreign policy that is good instead of regarding the nature of light.

Photons are emergent wave-particles of the electrons perhaps comparable to phonons or clumps of sound waves. Some have described the way sound waves travel through walls as perhaps comparable to the way light waves travel through space.

Einstein's revolutionary view of space-time is undergoing theoretical changes today. Though Einstein was a founder of quantum mechanics a lot more is known about the sub-atomic world today. His ideas about space-time and quantum mechanics would certainly differ if he formulated them now.

Why would photons be affected by a curvature of space-time instead of traveling straight through it like a neutrino travels straight through the Earth? Photons may have very small rather than no mass. Gravitational lensing of light from distant stars passing the sun as in Eddington’s observations not only shows that space appears curved in altering the line of travel of photons but reciprocally that photons have some small mass.

Einstein also did not believe anything traveled faster than light. He did not believe in quantum super positioning or entanglement calling it ‘spook action at a distance”. Researchers have demonstrated the existence of quantum super positioning in which information is exchanged between distant quantum particles determining their state repeatedly as occurring. The question exists about how and what actually occurs. The information is exchanged faster than light speed between bound particle pairs.

Some could speculate that the quantum world has no distance or dimensions on the scale of the solid-state scale of physics such as our universe that we humans experience. Others speculate that information is exchanged in a kind of quantum computing way in which all information affects every other part of the universe.

Imagine a million light year long line of billiard balls placed in a perfectly straight line in space. If one pushes the first ball in line one billiard ball diameter forward the last billiard ball in line would simultaneously move forward the same distance. The information would pass from point a at the start of the line to point b at the end faster than light. In a quantum world in which all things exist in some way as part of a monistic state and in which pluralist appears through dimensions and scale are phenomenal it would be possible to have a universal quantum simultaneity of time for information purposes while yet maintaining a protocol of component particle-wave parts in their right relations and potentials.

Yet if a photon is like an energy wave passing through a solid or aether if space is more of a solid than a vacuum, perhaps it could be regarded as emergent phenomena transferring energy rather than a thing for-itself.

Space may be a kind of solid that emerged with energy-mass. If photons are a field phenomenon the field may be expanding along with the expansion of space-time and the photons may be stationary, yet not in comparison to mass.

The speed of light in a vacuum is finite of course. It takes time for a photon to travel from the outer edge of thee sun to the Earth...about eight minutes. Yet photons could be an emergent phenomenon of very low mass kicking adjoining sections of space such that they arrive on Earth. That raises the question of what space is?

It could be that it is simply a form of mass or joined matter and anti-matter in a neutral state. Some of that at the big bang was ruptured and inflated. The continuing expansion of space may be a little like the steady-state theory of Hoyle in so far as space and virtual particle continue to be emitted from a sub-dimensional field. It is difficult to say if space expansion through the emergence of new space components stretches fields existing in it or not--one would probably guess so.

Einstein’s universe is a little strange. His formula E=MC2 gives the ratio of the convertibility of mass to energy. Mass converted to pure energy has the characteristic of forming at the proportion of its original mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. Light moving away from itself at its own speed in opposite directions is the basic energetic state.

When I think of energy, I think of it has potential mass, or mass in another form. Energy can be converted into mass and vice versa I believe.

Gravity is propagated at the speed of light also. Gravity acts upon mass. Gravity is an implicit part of the complete phenomena of mass, energy and the speed of light.

Because photons are basic energy in motion they have no mass, if mass might be regarded as a comparative rest state of energy. Photons may have no mass as they have no time on that graph of time and motion where mass has less time with increasing speed of motion relatively.

Because photons are energy and have relatively no mass I think it does not follow that they have no intrinsic mass and are a purely emergent phenomena of mass converted into energy. Compared with everything else that has less energy and speed they have no mass.

Mass not converted to energy traveling through space are said to become infinite accelerated near the speed of light. One would think that mass accelerated through space must be affected by the properties of space while photons are less affected. Space may have properties at the quantum level—I can’t say at what scale of size into which accelerated mass pushes adding gravity or relative mass unto itself as a field phenomena. Photons skip right through that however.

One might guess that photons are something like quantum units entangled at a distance that exchange information at a particular velocity. Quantum entanglement, superpositioned information occurs instantly at any distance faster than light obviously I believe. That super-positioning information is below the scale of space properties in which mass is entangled in a different, larger and slower way. Mass seems like a slower, stable form of energy. I think that I regard mass and energy as just materially existing things generally, although they are different phases of existing things. I therefore also regard photons as having some mass as existing things that are units of energy.

Wavelengths of energy of the electro-magnetic spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet and x-rays are not all visible to human eyes without technical assistance. I do not know if they all travel at the speed of visible light. The excitation of mass converted into energy and traveling as wave-particle analogues through space though affected a little by the properties of space indicates that photons are a low-mass or no-mass wave-particle propagation though a medium, or across a space-field of definite yet unknown properties.

Photons may be like the vibrations of a string given a certain amount of energy converted from mass. The string vibrations occur in a spatial field that limits and governs the mass and energy existing within it. Gravity, mass and energy are basic phenomena of the spatial field.