🧵 Untitled Thread
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 21:23:39 UTC No. 16167975
What exactly is the benefit to the idea that photons exist? Is there something missing if we just purely consider light a wave and never a particle? We don't seem to have any problem considering radio waves purely waves; there's no apparent need to invent a "radion" to call radio signals particles the way we do with photons and light. So what's the reason? Why is light so special that it can't just be a wave?
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 21:33:51 UTC No. 16167993
>>16167975
>photons exist
I'm not so sure about that
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 21:43:12 UTC No. 16168011
>>16167975
Look up quantization and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe.
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 21:46:04 UTC No. 16168013
>>16168011
>i have no idea what i'm talking about thats why i can't explain or specify anything
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 21:53:50 UTC No. 16168023
>>16167975
How do you explain the Photoelectric effect then? Think of a solar panel - low frequency light, like radio waves, will never impart any electric energy, no matter how much you shine on the panel. But just a small amount of visible or uv will immediately provide power
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 22:05:53 UTC No. 16168043
>>16168023
>low frequency light, like radio waves, will never impart any electric energy
Don't you find it interesting that radio waves are "low frequency LIGHT" yet they are not associated with photons the way light within the visible spectrum is? If visible light is made of photons, why is invisible light not made of photons?
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 22:17:10 UTC No. 16168069
Richard Feynman disapproves this thread
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 22:17:45 UTC No. 16168070
>>16168039
All waves act singular, so yes, magenta has its own wavelength
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 22:44:47 UTC No. 16168108
>>16168043
But they are? Radio waves are considered photonic, but not as strongly.
That's kinda the center of the whole duality - the longer the wavelength, the more wave-like it is. The shorter the wavelength, the more particle like. But even high energy gamma rays are still waves, and low energy radio light can still observed as a particle.
I know there's been results done with infrared photons; I admit I don't know if anythings been at as low an energy as radio
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 22:52:02 UTC No. 16168116
>>16167975
>We don't seem to have any problem considering radio waves purely waves
now u have me thinking they may be particles too
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 22:52:30 UTC No. 16168117
>>16168043
All "light" is just an oscillation of the EM/photon field
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 23:08:30 UTC No. 16168129
>The absolute state of /SCI/
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 23:18:16 UTC No. 16168138
>>16168108
Okay, but what's the benefit to creating this nonsensical duality instead of just ascribing different properties to different wavelengths? What is the benefit to saying light is a particle because of the photoelectric effect over just saying light waves of certain wavelengths have a photoelectric effect?
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 23:52:57 UTC No. 16168177
>>16168138
As technology improves, photoelectrics for bigger and bigger wavelengths can be detected; it isn't static, just the limit of current technology. Also there's been diffraction detected for all kinds of higher energy photons, so it's necessary that direction as well.
Anonymous at Thu, 9 May 2024 23:58:09 UTC No. 16168185
>>16168177
>As technology improves, photoelectrics for bigger and bigger wavelengths can be detected
All the more reason to consider it a property of waves, no?
>there's been diffraction detected for all kinds of higher energy photons
Photons only exist as a concept to explain waves "acting like particles," which seems like an unnecessary complication.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 00:52:46 UTC No. 16168239
>>16168185
>Consider it a property of waves
How? The whole shebang about waves is their elongation; they aren't localized at all. Soundwaves don't do it at all. Waves are a mathematical tool that was found to be applicable to light; a propagating disturbance through a medium. A big adaptation was already done by dropping the medium (turns out you can treat the vacuum as a pseudo-medium and it works fine). How do you make it accept all the particle-like behavior without changing what it is?
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 02:15:16 UTC No. 16168347
>>16167975
>What exactly is the benefit to the idea
The value of the theory is its predictive power, which allows us to build cool stuff, go places and have jobs.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 02:19:49 UTC No. 16168358
>>16168347
Also, I look forward to future generations of space telescope that can see so far into the "infrared" that they can image galaxies way beyond the current limit of the observable universe, whose visible photons have been stretched into radio particles.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 02:27:15 UTC No. 16168371
>>16168239
>Soundwaves don't do it at all.
They do, though. Sound waves are just extremely less energetic than light waves.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 10:23:11 UTC No. 16168786
>>16168023
Explain why you can't hear 10Hz, but 5kHz of the same intensity can be so loud that it hurts.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 10:39:13 UTC No. 16168801
>>16168117
>all <insert particle phenomenon> is just an oscillation of it's corresponding field
very helpful, I can see behind the matrix now
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 11:45:12 UTC No. 16168870
There's no benefit. The existence of photons is just a fact. In fact, its discovery was one of the greatest upsets in scientific history.
The debate on what light is goes back centuries. In the 1800's the double slit experiment showed that light behaved as a wave. And by the end of the 1800's, Maxwell and Hertz proved that it was a wave of electromagnetic force. People thought they finally understood light. There were still a few questions, like if waves on the ocean is a wave of pressure through water, and sound waves are a wave of pressure through air, then what substance is a light wave travelling through? They thought there must be some sort of light aether or something, but they were confident we could prove that one day.
But a major issue arised with the ultraviolet catastrophe. If light waves were smooth, continuous transfers of energy, then the hotter things in the universe should be radiating near infinite energy, which obviously wasn't happening. The way things were radiating energy made no sense according to the classical theories. Max Planck put forth a solution where energy was being transfered in discrete units, or "quanta", and even calculated what the size the quanta would have to be to "fix" the equation. But that was considered a desperate act to try explain away the UV catastrophe.
It wasn't until the discovery of the photoelectric effect that it became obvious that all the energy in the universe was being exchanged in quanta across space, like a particle. There was no electromagnetic aether. The "wave" was just a series of particle like exchanges that were happening in very strange, specific ways that made the whole system only seem like a wave. We had to scrap classical physics and come up with a new "quantum" physics to explain energy.
The number in Planck's equation wasn't just part of a desperate fix, it was a fundamental constant encoded into the universe. We call it Planck's constant now.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 12:42:31 UTC No. 16168921
>>16168801
Just specifying that there is no difference visible and invisible light, all electromagnetic phenomena are the same thing and oscillations of the same photonic field, you can use the wave demonstration I posted to visualize what an x-ray vs a radiowave looks like
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 12:47:04 UTC No. 16168923
>>16168371
Actually more energetic since you're moving heavier masses, just converting/transferring that energy leads to greater losses than just straight em to em transmission, if it required less energy to move larger masses than photons then sound should travel faster than light, the wave propagation speed is directly tied to the mass of the oscillating field and field density
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 13:39:04 UTC No. 16168965
Im going to stick a laser in your ass so that your body get overloaded with photons
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 14:06:59 UTC No. 16169001
>>16168870
>assume light are quanta
>oh look math based on this shows it is quanta
>oh look quanta is just shiny particle
every time.
Anonymous at Fri, 10 May 2024 16:50:14 UTC No. 16169243
>>16167975
>Eddington solar eclipse 1919