My goodness, but someone is touchy today. As I said, my little jello analogy was merely an example of how one might make an explanation to someone who clearly DOESN'T have the background, and I pretty clearly said it was NOT a better actual explanation of the phenomenon (or even a good one)...
Yeah, on re-reading my attempts to explain I see I did make a few errors of glibness.
That said, there is no reason why someone who understands what they're talking about can't explain the concept in ordinary language. In the event that one or two specialized definitions are required, then...
If you ignore the (rather snide) exhortations to go study the subject yourself, you ought to be getting the concept that a photon doesn't "look like" anything. Because it isn't something that you could look at. It is energy, not matter.
A photon is therefore not a "particle" as you're...
When you ask "what does a photon look like," it's difficult to present an accurate answer. It is just as accurate to say a photon doesn't look like anything, as it is to say it looks like everything. Because everything your eyes see is photons, and that's the only thing your eyes see. So you...
If by "capture" you mean the electron joins the proton in a new Hydrogen atom, that can certainly happen. But it only happens at extremely low energies. Just a handful of eV, no more. And the energies and directions of the two particles need to be just right.
But if you're talking about...
Well, from the point of view of the photon, at any given instant in time the photon is everywhere along its entire path of transmission from emission to absorbsion -- it all happens at once.
So from the photon's perspective it can be a very very long and thin "thing." As long as the...
In other words, light only travels in a vacuum. A single photon does not push through matter.
Transparent matter let's light through, because its particles absorb the photons as they come in, then emit another one out the other side.
This absorbing and emitting takes time, and the...
When a photon is emitted, where did it come from? Did something cause it to be created and then emitted, or was it inside something and then released? How's it work?
Yes, to both alternatives.
Spin really is a measure of angular momentum, just like the spin of a top. There's even torque involved.
Each particle has a specific spin that is intrinsic to the definition of what kind of particle you're dealing with. Electrons and quarks have a spin of...
A neutron is made of 2 down-quarks and 1 up-quark. Charge 0, mass 9.5-20 MeV/c^2 (actual mass is what was said above).
(downs have a charge of -1/3 and a mass of between 4 and 8 MeV/c^2)
(ups have a charge of +2/3 and a mass of between 1.5 and 4 MeV/c^2)
A proton is made of 1 down-quark...
But, but, but... in high school Chemistry, they taught us that electrons orbit around the nucleus; that there are a few specific distances at which these orbits form; that the farther out from the nucleus, the more energy the electrons have; that the farther out from the nucleus, the more...
1) Not all the beer leaves you. You absorb most of the carbs and alcohol.
2) Your body temperature is already what it is. The calories have already been expended to get it there. So when the cold beer enters your body, it starts absorbing heat rapidly. The proportional...
Here's a glib answer:
1) Time does not pass for an object traveling at velocity c.
1a) So as one approaches velocity c, time passes less and less.
.
2) We're talking about actual velocity, not apparent velocity.
2a) For example, a photon travels away from your flashlight at...
Problem with that, Pippo, is that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon that propagates as a result of the emanation of photons. But gravity is the "bending" of spacetime around mass, a very different thing. Neither one requires the phenomenon to ride on gravitons (or anything else, really)...
One prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity, is that the speed at which changes in location of a mass get propagated to other masses (the speed of gravity) ought to be the same as the speed of light.
A couple of years ago, a widely-reported experiment purported to confirm this...