Archive for ed-lake.com
February 2019

 Comments for Sunday, February 17, 2019, thru Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019: February 20, 2019 - This afternoon, while driving around doing chores, I finished listening to CD #4 of the 4 CD audio book set for "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli.   While it was generally worthwhile, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the book.  Too much of it is philosophy instead of science.  But Rovelli does make some good scientific points.  For example, he says this on page 43: For millennia before clocks, our only regular way of measuring time had been the alternation of day and night. The rhythm of day followed by night also regulates the lives of plants and animals. Diurnal rhythms are ubiquitous in the natural world. They are essential to life, and it seems to me probable that they played a key role in the very origin of life on Earth, since an oscillation is required to set a mechanism in motion. Living organisms are full of clocks of various kinds—molecular, neuronal, chemical, hormonal—each of them more or less in tune with the others. There are chemical mechanisms that keep to a twenty-four-hour rhythm even in the biochemistry of single cells. Later on the same page, Rovelli says,   Aristotle is the first we are aware of to have asked himself the question “What is time?,” and he came to the following conclusion: time is the measurement of change. Things change continually. We call “time” the measurement, the counting of this change. and So if nothing changes, if nothing moves, does time therefore cease to pass? Aristotle believed that it did. If nothing changes, time does not pass — because time is our way of situating ourselves in relation to the changing of things: the placing of ourselves in relation to the counting of days. Time is the measure of change: if nothing changes, there is no time. I agree with that, although I wouldn't phrase things that way.  Its a philosophical view, not a scientific view where (in my view) time is simply particle spin.  Change and other effects of particle spin are measurements of time, not time itself. Quantum Mechanics, of course, looks at time differently.  It quantizes time.  It requires that time consist of multiples of a specific unit ("quanta").  On page 54, Rovelli writes this about how time is viewed in Quantum Mechanics: The time measured by a clock is “quantified,” that is to say, it acquires only certain values and not others. It is as if time were granular rather than continuous. and The “quantization” of time implies that almost all values of time t do not exist. If we could measure the duration of an interval with the most precise clock imaginable, we should find that the time measured takes only certain discrete, special values. It is not possible to think of duration as continuous. We must think of it as discontinuous: not as something that flows uniformly but as something that in a certain sense jumps, kangaroo-like, from one value to another. In other words, a minimum interval of time exists. Below this, the notion of time does not exist—even in its most basic meaning. It's difficult for me to make any sense of that, and Rovelli doesn't try to.  He just describes it as another way for a philosopher to view time. The books provides a lot to think about, particularly about how entropy relates to time, but the net result of spending 4 hours and 23 minutes listening to the book while two weeks went by is more akin to confusion than enlightenment. February 18, 2019 - I my February 16 comment I mentioned that I had accessed some podcasts for the first time.  It was the first time I found podcasts that didn't require joining something and paying a fee.  The podcasts were on a web site titled Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, and there are currently 348 podcasts available. I began by listening to episode #348 in which the host of the show, David Barr Kirtley, interviews astrophysicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford.  While the whole interview was enjoyable and worthwhile, I found something very interesting near the end, at about the 1 hour, 2 minutes and 40 seconds mark.  At that point Benford says, I'm always trying to use my unconscious as much as possible in order to avoid extra labor. I think one of the great [mumble] about people is whether they've learned to use their unconscious to solve problems.  I use it every day. I review all the things I'm working on just before I go to sleep, and when I wake up in the morning I do not open my eyes, I lie there and recall what I was working on.  And about one time in three there is an idea there - for free - and it almost always works!  And it's been produced by your unconscious, which has still been working while you were asleep. That's exactly what I do!  I've mentioned it in comments I've written here many times.  Recently, I've been thinking about photons just before going to sleep, hoping that my unconscious mind will figure out something while I'm asleep.  I think it needs more information.  So, I'm going to have to do more research. In the Interview, Benford also mentions discussing the unconscious mind with another scientist, and together they wondered:   We evolved with an unconscious.  Why?  Why did we evolve with an unconscious mind? They had no answer to that.  Maybe they need to think about it just before going to sleep.  Or maybe I do. After finishing Episode #348, I started on Episode #347.  In it, David Barr Kirtley interviews three different science fiction writers about a science fiction anthology TV series titled "Dimension 404."  The series is on Hulu, and I'm not a subscriber, so I've never seen it.  I don't even know how to access Hulu. But, very little of the show was about "Dimension 404."  Mostly it was about other things.  They talked past TV anthology series such as "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits," "One Step Beyond" and "Amazing Stories."  And there is also a series titled "Black Mirror" on Netflix, which I've also never seen.  They also talked about a book called "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos," which I had never heard of before. I was probably ten minutes into the show when I had to grab a pen and a piece of paper so I could start making notes.  I didn't know Jeff Bezos had a company called "Blue Origin" which is involved with space exploration.  I may have read about it or heard about it before, but it never registered the way it did while I was listening to that podcast.   I listened to all or parts of about 6 other episodes, working backward through the list, and while they weren't all as interesting as the first two I'd heard, they sometimes caused me to grab that paper and pen again to make notes.  In one episode they mentioned other podcasts, such as Hardcore History, and shows by Joe Rogan.  I downloaded samples of those to check out.  I think I've just sampled a tiny tiny fraction of all the podcasts that are available.  Just prowling around this morning, I found that Science magazine has a web site of podcasts.  I downloaded a couple samples to check out when I find the time.  Meanwhile, someone sent me a link to a talk by an American doctor who was asked to fly to India in 1989 to treat Mother Teresa, who appeared to be dying.  I could only listen to it on my computer, but I'd like to save it as an MP3 file.  It's fascinating and funny, while at the same time being very serious and bizarre. It appears that I'm going to be listening to a lot of podcasts in the future.  I might even start taking my MP3 player with me again when I go to the gym. February 17, 2019 - Sometimes when I'm researching how photons and light waves work, I just feel like just giving up.  Things make no sense. Last week I researched the size of various atoms.  The books and articles and web sites all seem to generally agree on these sizes for various atoms: Barium (Ba) has a radius of 0.253 nanometers (253 picometers) Strontium (Sr) has a radius of 0.215 nanometers (215 picometers) Calcium (Ca) has a radius of 0.197 nanometers (197 picometers) Sodium (Na) has a radius of 0.190 nanometers (190 picometers) Lithium (Li) has a radius of 0.167 nanometers (167 picometers) Silver (Ag) has a radius of 0.165 nanometers (165 picometers) Copper (Cu) has a radius of 0.145 nanometers (145 picometers) And they also seem to generally agree that wavelengths have these sizes: And they all seem to agree that light is created this way: So, a photon hits an atom and is absorbed, which causes the outermost electron in the atom to jump to a higher, unstable energy level. The electron then falls back to its original energy level and the atom releases the extra energy in the form of a new light photon.  According to an on-line source: During the fall from high energy to normal energy, the electron emits a photon -- a packet of energy -- with very specific characteristics. The photon has a frequency, or color, that exactly matches the distance the electron falls. You can see this phenomenon quite clearly in gas-discharge lamps. Fluorescent lamps, neon signs and sodium-vapor lamps are common examples of this kind of electric lighting, which passes an electric current through a gas to make the gas emit light. The colors of gas-discharge lamps vary widely depending on the identity of the gas and the construction of the lamp. A frequency that matches a distance?  What does that mean?   You can also cause light to be emitted by applying heat to an atom.  Heat will cause the electron to jump to a higher level and then back down again to emit a photon.  The type of atom being heated will determine the color of the light that is emitted.  According to an on-line source, Sodium Na produces yellow color, Copper Cu gives blue. Barium Ba emits green and Strontium salts and lithium salts produce: Lithium carbonate, Li2CO3 emits red Strontium carbonate, SrCO3 emits bright red. Okay, so a sodium atom that is 0.38 nanometers in diameter will emit a yellow light wave that has a length of 580 nanometers - or a photon that is 290 nanometers in diameter.  And if that wave or photon hits a silver atom that has a diameter of 0.33 nm, it will be fully absorbed, and the silver atom will then emit a totally new 290 nm photon or new wave that is 580 nanometers long. How does an atom that is 0.33 nanometers in diameter absorb a light photon that is 879 times larger than the atom?   Or how does an atom absorb a wave that is 1,758 times the size of the atom?  Someone on Quora.com asked the question "How big is a photon?" and the general consensus seems to be that there is no answer to that question.  The answer that received twice as many "up votes" than everyone else put together was from a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of British Columbia who wrote: I’m pretty sure there is no possible answer to that question. A photon is a wave — usually a wave packet, which limits and fuzzily defines its net “length”, but it can occupy any number of different volumes and still be the same quantum. What is the size or volume of a shout? How can such a basic question have no possible answer?  Is it because no one is looking for an answer?  Because no one cares? While trying to find an answer (because I care) I found a link to a book that says this on pages 21 and 22: Physicists had known for nearly three decades that something was wrong, that a change was desperately needed to understand what was happening in the world of the very small—the world of atoms. But they were working blind. Atoms are simply too small to see through any normal microscope, no matter the magnification. The wavelength of visible light is thousands of times larger than the size of an individual atom. That's exactly what I just wrote.  Going back to the start of the book, I found this on pages 5 and 6: Despite the fact that every physicist agrees that quantum physics works, a bitter debate has raged over its meaning for the past ninety years, since the theory was first developed. And one position in that debate—held by the majority of physicists and purportedly by Bohr—has continually denied the very terms of the debate itself. These physicists claim that it is somehow inappropriate or unscientific to ask what is going on in the quantum realm, despite the phenomenal success of the theory. To them, the theory needs no interpretation, because the things that the theory describes aren’t truly real. Indeed, the strangeness of quantum phenomena has led some prominent physicists to state flatly that there is no alternative, that quantum physics proves that small objects simply do not exist in the same objectively real way as the objects in our everyday lives do. Therefore, they claim, it is impossible to talk about reality in quantum physics. There is not, nor could there be, any story of the world that goes along with the theory. The book (published in 2018) is "What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics" by Adam Becker.  The book goes on to say, The popularity of this attitude to quantum physics is surprising. Physics is about the world around us. It aims to understand the fundamental constituents of the universe and how they behave. Many physicists are driven to enter the field out of a desire to understand the most basic properties of nature, to see how the puzzle fits together. Yet, when it comes to quantum physics, the majority of physicists are perfectly willing to abandon this quest and instead merely “shut up and calculate,” in the words of physicist David Mermin.  and, This is an astonishing state of affairs, and hardly anyone outside of physics knows about it. But why should anyone else care? After all, quantum physics certainly works. For that matter, why should physicists care? Their mathematics makes accurate predictions; isn’t that enough?  No, it is not enough.  I could quote endlessly from the book, even though I've only read the first 22 pages so far.  The point seems to be that Quantum Mechanics is not about the real world, it is about calculating probabilities.  And the book doesn't seem to provide any answers, it seems to just describe the reason no one is even looking for answers: Physicists are fully satisfied with calculating probabilities.  As long as they can calculate probabilities and get good results, no one cares what is actually going on at the atomic level. When looking at the book on Amazon's web site, they displayed another book published in June of 2018 that looks interesting and similar: "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray Hardcover" by Sabine Hossenfelder.  I mentioned that book in my June 2, 2018 comment, when it first came out.  And that book led me to another book published in 2018: "Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different" by Philip Ball.  It has this famous Richard Feynman quote on page 6: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” And then it goes on to explain what Prof. Feynman meant: In case we didn’t get the point, Feynman drove it home in his artful Everyman style. ‘I was born not understanding quantum mechanics,’ he exclaimed merrily, ‘[and] I still don’t understand quantum mechanics!’ Here was the man who had just been anointed one of the foremost experts on the topic, declaring his ignorance of it. The book goes on to say, Feynman’s much-quoted words help to seal the reputation of quantum mechanics as one of the most obscure and difficult subjects in all of science. Quantum mechanics has become symbolic of ‘impenetrable science’, in the same way that the name of Albert Einstein (who played a key role in its inception) acts as shorthand for scientific genius. Feynman clearly didn’t mean that he couldn’t do quantum theory. He meant that this was all he could do. He could work through the math just fine – he invented some of it, after all. That wasn’t the problem. Sure, there’s no point in pretending that the math is easy, and if you never got on with numbers then a career in quantum mechanics isn’t for you. But neither, in that case, would be a career in fluid mechanics, population dynamics, or economics, which are equally inscrutable to the numerically challenged. No, the equations aren’t why quantum mechanics is perceived to be so hard. It’s the ideas. We just can’t get our heads around them. Neither could Richard Feynman. His failure, Feynman admitted, was to understand what the math was saying. It provided numbers: predictions of quantities that could be tested against experiments, and which invariably survived those tests. But Feynman couldn’t figure out what these numbers and equations were really about: what they said about the ‘real world’. The existence of these three books, all published in 2018, tells me that others are bothered by the problem.  And they aren't afraid of writing about it.  So, I'm not alone.  But it sometimes seems like I'm the only one who is trying to make sense of it all.  They write about the problem, not about attempts to solve the problem. No one is saying that it is impossible for an atom to absorb and emit a photon that is a thousand times larger than the atom.  It is just not something that happens in the visible universe.  Or does it?

Comments for Friday, February 1, 2019, thru Saturday, February 2, 2019:

February 2, 2019 - I had to stop at a grocery store this afternoon to pick up some supplies, and while I was unloading my basket onto the conveyor belt I realized there was an argument going on between the elderly black man in front of me and the big beefy white guy in front of him.  The elderly black guy was chuckling, so it wasn't a heated argument.  But the two men didn't seem to know each other, so you couldn't call it a "friendly argument."  The white guy was ranting about building a wall along the border with Mexico, and how it would stop all the drugs that were illegally coming into this country.  The black guy was just shaking his head, chuckling, and saying it was a waste of money.

It looked like it was safe for me to agree with the black guy when they both glanced at me, so I did so.  A wall isn't going to stop drug smugglers.  Drug smugglers dig tunnels under walls when there is a wall to get past.  Mostly, though, they smuggle drugs in by boat, by plane and by hiding them inside trucks and other vehicles that pass through the customs check points.

I didn't get a chance to argue that point before the white guy picked up his groceries and left.  But, I wish I had been there to see how the argument started.  It had to have been started by the white guy.  What kind of person would start a political argument in a line at a grocery store?  I imagine it is the same kind of guy who would yell at the TVs at the gym, like the guy I saw do that at my gym last week.  It's the type of guy who is accustomed to getting his way by force

How do you argue with someone who gets his way by force, instead of by logic and reasoning?  The white guy in the grocery line and the guy at the gym were obviously driven by hate of some kind.  There is no way to reason with people who are driven by hate and who use force to get their way.  Luckily we can still out-vote them.

February 1, 2019
- Yesterday, I was browsing through a couple papers related to the article
titled "Physicists Have Built a Machine That Actually Breaks Two Rules of Light" that I mentioned in my January 30 comment.  Somewhere, while doing research, I saw mention of a book titled "Fundamentals of Photonics."  Hmm.  The word "photonics" is defined this way:
Photonics is the physical science of light (photon) generation, detection, and manipulation through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and sensing.
So, photonics is about photons!  I've been searching for information about how photons work!  It seems that instead of looking for articles about photons, I should have been looking for articles about photonics!  When I searched for the book "Fundamentals of Photonics," I found two books with that title.

The first one, by B.E.A. Saleh and M.C. Teich, is the one mentioned in the source I found.  It says this on page vi of the Forward:
The theories of light are presented at progressively increasing levels of difficulty.  Thus light is described first as rays, then scalar waves, then electromagnetic waves, and, finally, photons.
The photon theory of light is the most difficult!?!?   As I see it, looking at light purely as photons would greatly simplify everything.

1. Ray Optics
2. Wave Optics
3. Beam Optics
4. Fourier Optics
5. Electromagnetic Optics
6. Polarization and Crystal Optics
7. Guided Wave Optics
8. Fiber Optics
9. Resonator Optics
10. Statistical Optics
11. Photon Optics
12. Photons and Atoms
13. Laser Amplifiers
14. Lasers
15. Photons in Semiconductors
16. Semiconductor Photon Sources
17. Semiconductor Photon Detectors
18. Electro-optics
19. Nonlinear Optics
20. Acousto-optics
21. Photonic Switching and Computing
22. Fiber-Optic Communications
Chapter 11 begins on page 386 with this:
Light consists of particles called photons.  A photon has zero rest mass and carries electromagnetic energy and momentum.  It also carries an intrinsic angular momentum (or spin) that governs its polarization properties.  The photon travels at the speed of light in a vacuum (c0); its speed is retarded in matter.  Photons also have a wavelike character that determines their localization properties in space and the rules by which they interfere and diffract.
If light photons spin, how can 3D movies work?  In theaters, TWO projectors produce a double image on the screen.  The 3D glasses let you see one image though your left eye and the second image through your right eye.  If the photons coming from the screen were spinning, how could they be oriented correctly when they reach your eyes?

And I think the idea that photons interact and interfere with each other is nonsense because photons have no "wavelike character."  So, it seems the author of the book is going to force photons to behave like waves because waves are understood and photons are not.

But, it looks like the book has a few chapters that are definitely worth studying.

The second book, edited by Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri, consists of "10 modules written by experts in the photonics field" and has this on page 6:
Scientists have observed that light energy can behave like a wave as it moves through space, or it can behave like a discrete particle with a discrete amount of energy (quantum) that can be absorbed and emitted. As we study and use light, both models are helpful.

Concept of a photon

The particle-like nature of light is modeled with photons. A photon has no mass and no charge. It is a carrier of electromagnetic energy and interacts with other discrete particles (e.g., electrons, atoms, and molecules).
A beam of light is modeled as a stream of photons, each carrying a well-defined energy that is dependent upon the wavelength of the light.
Groan!  I'm trying to find a source that describes light as photons without any mention of waves or beams.  Any source that uses two different models for light is a source that does not understand light.  As I see it, light consists of photons - PERIOD - and photons have a disk shape, which physicists mistakenly think makes it "wavelike."

The second book might contain something worthwhile, but I'll definitely be focusing on chapters 11 and 12 of the first book.  And it looks like the definition of the word "photonics" needs to be changed to:

Photonics is the physical science of light generation, detection, and manipulation through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and sensing, in which photon models are used when the particle properties of light can be accurately modeled using mathematics, and wave models of light are used when the wavelike properties of light can be accurately modeled using mathematics.  No one has any idea how light really works.
I was thinking of adding an additional sentence: "It's like the blind leading the blind."  But, I decided that would be a bit much.