Re: Time Dilation Experiments

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 7:11:49 PM UTC-7, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 7:06:40 PM UTC-7, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 3:00:22 PM UTC-7, Stan Fultoni wrote:

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 12:47:27 PM UTC-7, det...@outlook.com wrote:

Individual photons HAVE a frequency.

Not in the sense that you are imagining. The only sense in which an individual photon in quantum electrodynamics has a frequency is the proportionality between the phases of the possible paths and the respective path lengths, which determines the probability of a photon landing at a particular place. This proportionality does not manifest itself as a temporal frequency, and for a simple path with just a single predominant contribution (as in a radar gun operation) there is no quantum interference involved, so this is all irrelevant. In this circumstance, each photon just carries a single phase, and the progression of the phase is just due to the sequence of photons, each with a slightly advanced phase from the previous one.

The point is that they are individual particles which each have a wave-like property.

Well, in quantum electrodynamics, photons are not (in general) even conserved, so they are not individual particles in that sense, and the only sense in which they have a wave-like property is that they correspond to terms in the solution of the wave equation, which is why electromagnetic radiation has wavelike behavior.

You personally attack the author of that NASA article.

You're mistaken. I pointed out the fallacy of referring to that little web page as a “NASA article”, because (first) NASA’s charter is not to study quantum electrodynamics, and (second) the guy who created that page is not (and does not claim to be) a physicist, he is a retired manager (who once worked in the meteorology group), and has professional expertise in neither relativity nor quantum theory, and (third) he created the page for K-12 students (as it explicitly says), in order to demonstrate to the youngsters the power of mathematical thinking… the very kind of thinking that you (Ed) habitually dismiss with venomous contempt. I;ve also pointed out the shortcomings of the content of that page. None of this is a personal attack on the guy who created that page. It is a demolition of your silly attempt to appeal to authority.
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You ignore that the article says “acts to add energy to the photon. Therefore,
we expect the photon frequency to increase."

No, I do not ignore that, I point out that his “expectation” for the frequency to increase in proportion to the energy is not coming from any mechanistic or conceptual explanation, he is simply smuggling this in by invoking a misunderstanding of the quantum relation E = h nu, because the frequency in that relation is actually the frequency of the source, not of the photon (which does not have a frequency). He does not claim to explain how one would measure the frequency of an individual photon, and for good reason, because an individual photon does not exhibit any temporal frequency.

But, let's focus this comment: "A radar speed gun is permanently tuned to frequencies
in the radar range, and ordinarily the only incoming radiation in that range of frequencies
is the reflected signal from its own transmitter." If you believe radar guns and radios tune
into waves, then you need to explain how they separate one set of waves from another.

I just did. Again, radios and speed guns are *tuned* to the specific frequencies of interest. By a simple spectral decomposition we can easily extract the spectrum of the received radiation in the range of interest. We see a bump in the spectrum in one range representing the background return, and we see another bump at a different frequency that represents the reflection off the target. This is how radar speed guns work. Likewise radios work by being tuned to the frequency of the carrier wave, and they detect the modulations of that carrier wave to get the signal. This is all very elementary. Is any of this unclear to you?

With photons it's not a problem.

To the contrary, the practical difficulties of creating a device that measures the energy of individual photons for purposes of inferring relative speeds would make it virtually impossible. And of course creating a device that measures the "frequencies of individual photons" is literally impossible, because individual photons neither possess nor exhibit temporal frequencies. See above.

If you were talking about sound waves, and you were getting waves from a dozen
different sources at the same time, you'd be listening to indecipherable NOISE.

That’s crazy. Haven't you ever heard of sonar? The statements you are making now are just crazy. You apparently have no conception of spectral analysis and frequency tuning. You don’t even know how an ordinary transistor radio works. Amazing.

You CLAIM the gun can distinguish the frequency it wants.

Of course it can, just as can an ordinary radio. Sheesh.
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Yes, it can do that with PHOTONS…

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Well, individual photons don’t have temporal frequencies, but electromagnetic radiation is composed of photons, which in the aggregate exhibit wavelike behavior, and this is how radios and speed guns and other common electronic devices work. None of these devices are examining individual photons, neither for their energy, nor for their temporal frequencies (which individual photons don’t possess).
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What does a radar gun do when it gets a red light wave, then an AM wave,
then brown light wave, then a TV wave, then a radio wave, then an infrared
wave - one after the other - all mixed up?

The circuit is tuned to the radar range of frequencies, many orders of magnitude away from the frequencies of all those other signals. They don’t even show up in the spectral analysis. The first thing you need to learn is how filters and tuning work in electronic devices. This is very elementary.

If the waves are not mixed up, how is that possible? What do these waves look like?

Well, the raw input in the microwave range on which radar operates looks like the superposition of waves of two different frequencies, one coming from the background, and another coming from the target. By simple spectral (fast Fourier transform) analysis, we can extract the amplitudes of each of those frequencies. A simple speed gun just assumes that the highest beat frequency represents the moving target, so it computes the speed using the Doppler formula for that frequency.

And how do you emit WAVES in a 12-degree cone? Won't the waves spread out once
they leave the emitter cone?

That question was answered by Huygens, et al, over 300 years ago. People used to say (centuries ago) “If you stand behind a tree and shout, I can hear you, but I can’t see you, so sound can spread out but light must propagate in straight lines, so light must be particles”. But then Huygens figured out that the “fanning out” (diffraction) of a wave depends on the wavelength, and sound has a relatively enormous wavelength, so it fans out very quickly, but the wavelength of (say) visible light is incredibly small, so it diffracts from straight line propagation only very slightly. However, light does diffract, as you can see in the two-slit experiment, for example, which demonstrated the wavelike behavior of light (as confirmed experimentally by Young around 1800).

So what, everybody knows that.

Remember the neutrinos are supposed to be the
anti-particles as much as they're the partners.
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So, "photon neutrinos", is, basically that the massy
aspect of the photon is its wavepacket, or that
the massy aspect is the neutrino.
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The radiant in heat results for surfaces, that
surfaces absorb waves of light as they absorb
packets of light, or photons.
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The massy aspect of the image is of course the
source, in massy aspects of the photons, waves, or light.
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(Which are none because photons are mass-less.)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_theory_of_light
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