how fast does light think light travels?(physics question)

[Tuomio]

When you turn on your speakers your ears registers wavelenghts, which you will "hear" as a sound. If you could turn up the speakers resonance (the back and forth motion) dramatically, you would lose the "sound" and your TV + other remote controlled home devices would go wild. Kicking slightly more hertzes in the poor loudspeaker, your eye sensors would start to register the previous source of sound, the speaker would start to "glow". Next step would be rapid fainting of the light towards dark red and it would began to emit infrared, which you can feel on your skin as an heat. Even further down the road would be x-rays and similar nasty stuff.

This is my grasp of this issue, light is just an loose term for resonance exchange between atoms in certain hertzes (which eventually boils down to electromagnetism). As is sound or heat. In an vacuum they all travel at the speed constant c (which is called the speed of light, do not take literally).

So when "light" reflects from any surface (mirror, white paint, green paint, no difference), there is no actual photons bouncing off, but just the surface of the reflective source emitting the wavelenghts it is receiving. The more efficent it is at this job (= the less it heats up), the more reflective it will appear.

[Holden McGroin]

Originally posted by Tuomio
... light is just an loose term for resonance exchange between atoms in certain hertzes..  

No atoms to exchange resonances in the vacuum of deep space, yet light travels.

[vorticon]

no tuomio...sound is one sort of wave (similar to water waves) and needs a medium...light is like radio waves...it requires no medium to travel...

[AKIron]

Not the ole "Which came first, the particle or the wave?" debate.

[Udie]

look damnit I wasn't kidding when I said don't get in to the particle/wave thing!

[Holden McGroin]

I agree with Udie: getting into an involved discussion of wave particle duality would be cumbersome on this BBS and would necessarily require the discussion of DeBroglie and the development of his formula for the wavelength of particles, i.e. wavelength = h/p.

Since in the macroscopic world momentum, p, tends to be large (even when particles have the smallest of velocities) DeBroglie wavelengths of large objects are minute and impossible to measure, but for atomic particles or smaller a noticeable property can be calculated.
 
The wavelength cannot be seen by simple observation. For a particle to display this property it must be treated as a wave, and therefore an experiment such as Young's double slit must be conducted using it. So therefore discussion on this BBS could be burdensome.

A discussion would then inevitably lead to the discussion of several unified theories of interaction that have been proposed in theoretical physics to explain the known particles and forces. The two most commonly accepted are the theories of multidimensional hyperspace (strings and superstrings) and the Standard Model.

Multidimensional theories require the acceptance of more than four dimensions, involve a great deal of computation, and do not yet predict an adequate way to manipulate our environment. The Standard Model requires a plethora of particles, appears to require more each day, and does not yet effectively address gravitation.

So for all these reasons, deferring from discussion of wave particle duality may be a reasonable course of action.

[bozon]

Originally posted by Udie
look damnit I wasn't kidding when I said don't get in to the particle/wave thing!

It's natural NOT to understand it.
The reason is that we do not have a macroscopic, everyday analogy for it, that's why you can't imagine a particle that spreads like a wave.

So, is light a wave or a particle? it's neither or both, define it how you please, It simply not like anything you know from daily life.

How do we treat it then, as a wave or as a particle?
quantum mechanics solves it this way:
When dealing with the kinematics, I mean the movement of the "particle", or it's location as function of time, we treat it as a wave. The example is the light going through a pair of slits and giving an interference pattern on a screen (a point particle would pass only though one of the holes and cannot interfere with itself).
When we deal with interaction with the "particle", we consider it to be one "bandle" of energy/momentum. The common example is the photo-electric effect, where a photon absorbed in matter, can only give a certain amount of evergy typical of it's "color".

and here is the connection - the amount of energy in the particle (or color) is determined by it's wave frequency (and vice versa).

Bozon

[ravells]

Schroedinger comes home from work and meets his wife at the door.

Mrs. Schroedinger says, 'What the hell did you do to the cat? It looks half dead!'

Later over dinner, Schroedinger muses to his wife, 'I just don't know what is wrong with Heisenberg.  He seems so sure of himself lately.'

Meanwhile, Heisenberg is stopped by the police for speeding.

The traffic cop asks him, "Do you know how fast
you were going?" Heisenberg replies, "No, but I know exactly where I am".

Ravs.

[AKIron]

So, I guess the question isn't "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, will it make a sound?" but rather "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, did it really fall?"

[Holden McGroin]

Quantam theory can predict the odds that the tree fell and  Schroedinger says the tree is both standing and fallen

[ravells]

And a particle physicist might ask whether there was ever a tree there at all.

Quantum Theory made my brain ache. One of our teachers told us this old physicist's motto:

To understand something means to derive it from quantum mechanics, which nobody understands.

Ravs

[AKIron]

So, regarding the spoon, maybe there is and maybe there isn't.

[ravells]

precisely

or is that imprecisely?

Ravs

[bozon]

I'm pretty certain that Schroedinger's cat is dead by now.

Bozon