I badly need light beams /light waves /photons to have rest-mass. Which all of respected and accepted science denies.
Maybe the conundrum is in the way we
express ourselves. Since rejecting The Aether around 1900, science has determinedly
talked of “empty-space” /the void /the space-time vacuum and made fabulously
correct calculations on that assumption. But space is not empty. There is
nowhere, no location large or small, in this or any other imagined universe that
is not criss-crossed, cross-hatched with ever changing, legible electro-magnetic
light radio waves. Every possible sphere, large or small, seethes with
data-carrying, energetic, stable, permanent, visible and legible signals,
broadcast by every phenomenon, large or small, from single electrons to
brain-waves to colliding galaxies. It is these signals that enable us via our
instruments to see the universe. I think these waves and photons have energy
/mass and create the dynamic structures that create dynamic inertia. I think
the Victorians were not wrong; I now call it The
Aether-Matrix.
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| COMING SOON - SUNJAMMER 2014 NASA'S SOLAR SAIL DRIVEN BY SUNLIGHT. |
If "weightless" photons
are the primary particles - they are not massless – they must have rest-mass.
Many articles state that gravity has no effect on photons /Wavicles – but the
famous observation of a solar eclipse, to prove Einstein’s theories, was of
light from distant stars being curved by the gravity of the sun. Was that solar
gravity tugging light beams or were they merely massless photons travelling
through “curved space-time”?
But, the “weight” of sunlight has
been demonstrated: (e.g.
The difference between Lebedev's contraption, called a
Nichols Radiometer, and the failed Crookes' set up was Lebedev's panels twisted
on their string even in a complete vacuum. When the other contraption was
totally evacuated of air, the paddles stopped. In the absence of any other
force on the paddles (including heat), Lebedev finally proved that it was light
pushing the paddles around.)
Four years ago while attending physics classes, I thought I read on the internet (and made notes of it) that Mathematician Mitchell Figenbaum ascribed a rest mass to the photon of 10E-49 grams. I cannot now find the article I read – nor any mention of 10E-49 grams. Contrariwise, internet searches now tell me, a thousand times over, that photons have no rest mass. I might even start to believe it.
The solar wind does however have
weight, often referred to as the pressure of sunlight. This “wind” that streams
the tails of meteors and comets away from the sun does contain particles other
than “massless” photons, such as neutrinos – and presumably hydrogen and helium
atoms expelled from the sun. But it is mostly photons. NASA has announced the “2014
Sunjammer mission which will deploy a sail that measures approximately 38
metres along one side with a total surface area of around 1,200 square metres,
or a third of an acre. That's seven times larger than any solar sail tested in
space to date.”
Citing, yet again, E=MC2 each gram of photons must compress or empty or attract energy from the ever Hubble expanding, basic, all pervasive electromagnetic field; in today's values (2013) clearing a volume of a sphere in “empty” space with a diameter of 500,000,000 meters or 500,000 kilometres (575,805,138.9118680 meters) and compacting the light to make a rest mass of 1 gram.
1 gram of
photons at my imaginary rest mass represents
ten-thousand-billion-billion-billion-billion photons. So a single photon needs
to collect the energy from a sphere of 6E-38 metres diameter; at current 2013
values (as my universe is dynamic not static and changes with time) of the
energy that "empty" space contains. That is a surprisingly small
sphere – so I wonder if my arithmetic is awry?
The essential search here is for the
mechanism that turns pure energy into matter – and confers a reliable life span
on the matter and the things it builds – say three-score-years-and-ten on a not
totally repellent, complex walking sack of saline solution, such as me, for
example. We are searching for the magic that converts ephemeral, insubstantial straw
into solid, long lasting gold. Every subatomic action in every passing
micro-second in every one of my 100 trillion cells – and all of the cells’
interchanges and co-operations – and the signature signals from the whole
(person) broadcasts into the field of the Aether-Matrix and thus informs and
reforms the energy field.
If a photon is the product of
intersecting light/ radio waves at a place or focus that compacts energy from
the surrounding field, such entities subsist everywhere. Each photon draws and holds the energy of a measurable
sphere which logically must for a time contain less free-energy – the existence
of a photon attenuates the space around it – it exists in a partial vacuum. I
envisage the particle as a spinning vortex, a whirlwind, winding in the light
field, creating a surface, with compression within and relative vacuum without.
The relative vacuums “attract” and the
spinning surfaces “repel” – creating dynamic inertia.
The orientations of such
transitional phenomena, as they combine, may account for magnetic dipoles and
monopoles.
Light does not “travel”. Light does
not “speed”. Light propagates. The energetic event we observe as light is an
event that passes energy from light wave to light wave – at 300,000 KPS which
is (so far) a basic quantum of our universe. This is the medium that propagates
light, in wave formations that we do intuitively understand (because we are
made from this stuff) and see in water, gases and all materials – even in rock.
As the energy travels or spherically broadcasts it stimulates in-situ photons
that we can then see – whatever the carrier wavelength. Thus the photons, in
spheres surrounding an energetic event, might appear to be travelling faster
than C 300,000 kilometres per second.
As the spinning entities we name as
photons combine, they make other particles, a myriad of particles to which we
ascribe a myriad of new names and properties. And the photons disappear into
the transformation.
That’s it for now; I have written
down part of what was in my head – until I realise how wrong this article is
and revisit to correct it.
Massless particles [edit]
Massless
particles have zero rest mass. Their relativistic mass is simply their
relativistic energy, divided by c2,
or m(relativistic) = E/c2.[25][26] The
energy for photons is E = hfwhere h is Planck's constant and f is the photon frequency. This
frequency and thus the relativistic energy are frame-dependent.
If
an observer runs away from a photon in the direction it travels from a source,
having it catch up with the observer, then when the photon catches up it will
be seen as having less energy than it had at the source. The faster the
observer is traveling with regard to the source when the photon catches up, the
less energy the photon will have. As an observer approaches the speed of light
with regard to the source, the photon looks redder and redder, by relativistic
Doppler effect (the
Doppler shift is the relativistic formula), and the energy of a very long-wavelength photon approaches zero. This
is why a photon is massless;
this means that the rest mass of a photon is zero.
Massless particles contribute rest mass and invariant mass to
systems [edit]
Two
photons moving in different directions cannot both be made to have arbitrarily
small total energy by changing frames, or by moving toward or away from them.
The reason is that in a two-photon system, the energy of one photon is
decreased by chasing after it, but the energy of the other will increase with
the same shift in observer motion. Two photons not moving in the same direction
will exhibit an inertial frame where the combined energy is smallest,
but not zero. This is called the center of mass frame or the center of
momentumframe; these terms are almost synonyms (the center of mass
frame is the special case of a center of momentum frame where the center of
mass is put at the origin). The most that chasing a pair of photons can
accomplish to decrease their energy is to put the observer in frame where the
photons have equal energy and are moving directly away from each other. In this
frame, the observer is now moving in the same direction and speed as the center
of mass of the two photons. The total momentum of the photons is now zero,
since their momentums are equal and opposite. In this frame the two photons, as
a system, have a mass equal to their total energy divided by c2. This mass is
called the invariant massof the pair of photons together.
It is the smallest mass and energy the system may be seen to have, by any
observer. It is only the invariant mass of a two-photon system that can be used
to make a single particle with the same rest mass.
Since sunlight has energy, it
also has a mass associated with it as indicated by Einstein's famous equation E
= mc^2 or m = E/(c^2).
An elementary textbook says the sun converts 4.2 x 10^9 kg of mass to energy every second. Using this number, we can estimate the amount of energy (mass) from the sun hitting the earth by calculating the fraction of the entire solid angle the earth intercepts as seen by the sun. Since the diameter of the earth is about 1.3 x 10^7 m and it is 1.5 x 10^11 m from the sun, it subtends an angle of about 8.7 x 10^-5 radians. If we square this angle and divide by 4 pi = 12.6, we get the solid angle fraction subtended by the earth, which I calculate to be about 6 x 10^-10 of the entire solid angle. Multiplying this by the 4.2 x 10^9 kg burned by the sun every second and we obtain 2.5 kg/s as the mass of the photons (light) from the sun striking the earth every second.
There is another way to guesstimate this number using the rough estimate of 1 kW/m^2 as the energy of the sunlight striking the earth. Multiplying this by the area of a disk with the area of the cross section of the earth (pi x R^2 = 1.3 x 10^14 m^2) gives 1.3 x 10^17 J/s. Dividing this by the velocity of light squared (c^2 = 9 x 10^16) gives 1.4 kg/s. I consider this to be in excellent agreement with the figure of 2.5 kg/s obtained above.
Please let me know if you find this less than clear or would like more information or explanation.
Best, Dick Plano, Professor of Physics emeritus,
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