- #141
Drakkith
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DaleSpam said:Well said.
I agree!
DaleSpam said:Well said.
GrayGhost said:Well, that being the case, I'd have to accept that the photon would be considered to form at-once ... whatever "at-once" means at the quantum level. If the electron jumps the bands in zero time, then it stands to reason the photon should be formed at-once. Difficult to swallow, but QM is a rock solid theory, so.
GrayGhost
bobc2 said:Perhaps the closest we could get to instantaneous would be within a Planck time.
GrayGhost said:Yes, I was referring to the actual published theory, in 1915. I do realize that Einstein deliberated over a medium for the years thereafter.
bcrowell said:No, this is incorrect. Einstein wrote a 1924 paper in which he made the philosophical point that although relativity killed off the luminiferous aether as the supposed medium of electromagnetic vibrations, it still imbued the vacuum with specific physical characteristics, such as curvature and energy. The basic point of the paper is that we can't decide, purely based on philophical ideas like Mach's principle, whether the vacuum has its own properties; we actually have to go through the usual scientific cycle of theory and experiment in order to find out the answer.
DaleSpam said:Post 28 deals with the historical information you mentioned and posts 28 - 64 deal with the semantics of the word "medium" in this context.
GrayGhost said:Yes, I was referring to the actual published theory, in 1915. I do realize that Einstein deliberated over a medium for the years thereafter.
GrayGhost
GrayGhost said:[..] I happen to be one of these folks, those who have the opinion that all objects are some state of the medium. I do agree that any opinion is premature in the lack of enough proof. Nonetheless, everything is premature until proven true, or otherwise. I must say though, it is very surprising IMO that in the past 96 years, it remains premature.
GrayGhost
harrylin said:A century isn't much if you think of other things like that: didn't atoms take more than a millennium to be proven beyond reasonable doubt?
bobc2 said:Roger Penrose seems to believe that particle wave functions are the realities of nature, whereas many other physicists feel there is no objective reality for a particle until the wave function collapses. This all makes for difficulty in imagining the details of how a photon is created.
bobc2 said:Perhaps the closest we could get to instantaneous would be within a Planck time.