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PeterDonis
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binis said:Has the emitted photon a longer wavelength?
You are pushing the heuristic picture to the point where it breaks down.
binis said:Has the emitted photon a longer wavelength?
Alright, but what is actually happening? It is a question I've had, it's just that every class I've had so far has left me with that impression. Is it beyond the scope of this thread?PeterDonis said:It isn't.
Yes.
As noted, this is a heuristic picture. It's not 100% accurate.
In the sense that photons still have zero rest mass inside a medium, to the extent the "photon" concept makes sense inside a medium, yes.
AndreasC said:what is actually happening?
AndreasC said:Is it beyond the scope of this thread?
Would you mind linking me to some of said articles?PeterDonis said:The "photons getting absorbed and re-emitted" heuristic is more or less based on perturbative QFT, but all of the caveats about virtual particles (about which we have several good Insights articles) apply to that heuristic.
AndreasC said:Would you mind linking me to some of said articles?
AndreasC said:You can think of light moving through matter as photons slamming into atoms, being absorbed and then being emitted again, many times over.
We drifted away from the original topic because the op asked how light appears to slow down when it passes through matter even though its speed is supposed to be always the same. I tried to answer to the best of my knowledge but someone explained that it is not entirely correct. Now after that I started looking around a bit and I found out that there is actually a section of the FAQ of this website which discusses this and explains why my version is incorrect. Imo the FAQ is a little bit harder to find than it should for a FAQ but beyond that, OP can look there!Vanadium 50 said:Sure, you can think of it, but you'd be wrong.
If this were true, the refractive indices in gasses would depend on pressure, but not temperature. They depend on both. If this were true, the refractive index of graphite would be much lower than diamond (because of densities). In fact, it's higher.
I note that we have drifted quite some way from the original topic, perhaps because multiple people have attempted to answer the original question but have instead injected their own misunderstandings into the thread.
Link?AndreasC said:I found out that there is actually a section of the FAQ of this website which discusses this and explains why my version is incorrect. Imo the FAQ is a little bit harder to find than it should for a FAQ but beyond that, OP can look there!
AndreasC said:You can think of light moving through matter as photons slamming into atoms, being absorbed and then being emitted again, many times over. This process has the effect of slowing down the propagation of the wave as a whole but each individual photon still moves at c while being scattered from atom to atom, it's just that this whole process makes it take longer to get to the other side of the material.
Sure! https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/do-photons-move-slower-in-a-solid-medium/berkeman said:Link?
AndreasC said:We drifted away from the original topic because the op asked how light appears to slow down when it passes through matter even though its speed is supposed to be always the same.
#17 and #22.Vanadium 50 said:Which message?
Oh sorry then, I got confused.mfb said:binis didn't start the thread, and I already asked to stay on topic as response to that.
If you print them then they obviously have, but if you read them as pdf's on a computer screen, then it's a very nontrivial physical question.SSG-E said:These articles have energy but do they have mass?
Photons have zero mass and are not at rest in any reference frame. If you are trying to determine how photons are affected by gravity, the equivalent property for mass would be ## \frac {hf} {c^2}## .SSG-E said:Electrons don't come at rest. Electron rest mass is the mass of an electron as measured when its speed is zero relative to an observer. A photon never comes at rest thus its rest mass is 0. But why can't be the rest mass of a photon be measured when its speed is zero relative to the observer?
That's because the photon is being absorbed and re-emitted by the atoms it runs into, however in-between the atoms, it travels a c.binis said:Not always i.e. inside glass they are moving slower,and inside heavy water of a nuclear reactor very slow.
Vanadium 50 said:If this were true, the refractive indices in gasses would depend on pressure, but not temperature. They depend on both. If this were true, the refractive index of graphite would be much lower than diamond (because of densities). In fact, it's higher.
There is really nothing Newtonian about light; in fact, it is the basis of relativity (all of us are moving at the speed of light, just not through space as much as through time as illustrated by a space-time light cone diagram).vanhees71 said:And this leads to wrong conclusions. Gravity should be treated within GR, and a naive photon model, i.e., treating the em. wave as a massless point particle has its justification in the eikonal approximation of the Maxwell equation in a spacetime background. E.g., you get the famous deflection of light on the Sun, which lead to Einstein's fame in the public in 1919, when Eddington et al confirmed the prediction of this deflection from GR. The naive idea to just take ##hf/c^2## as the mass of the photon in a Newtonian gravitational field leads to only half the value, but of course the value from GR turned out to be right.
The reason, why for "photons" the Newtonian approximation gets wrong by a factor 2 precisely is the fact that it is always a relativistic object. That's why the Newtonian solution for the Kepler motion in a Newtonian (weak) gravitational field is correct for slow massive objects as testparticles in a gravitational field is a (very) good approximation to the full general-relativistic solution but not for relativistic "objects" like photons.
TonyP0927 said:it is the basis of relativity (all of us are moving at the speed of light