Can a light photon be frozen by space?

[dryson]

Although this is going to be lableled as junk science or not even wrong it does pose an interesting question. Since all matter reacts differently to the various ranges of temperature and forms either solid's,gase's,liquid's or plasma's wouldn't a photon also be affected in a similar manner? So can a light photon be frozen by space if there is not any energy present to excite the light photon?

 

[MeteorWayne]

A photon is not matter.

 

[a_lost_packet_]

A photon does not have mass and, according to special relativity, MUST travel at the speed of light just like anything without mass must do. However, you can effect its speed of propagation through a medium. ie: Slow Light Work with Bose Einstein Condensates first achieved this, IIRC. Now, it is being achieved, reportedly, using standard materials.

I don't know what you mean about "excite the light photon."

 

[origin]

Although this is going to be lableled as junk science or not even wrong it does pose an interesting question. Since all matter reacts differently to the various ranges of temperature and forms either solid's,gase's,liquid's or plasma's wouldn't a photon also be affected in a similar manner? So can a light photon be frozen by space if there is not any energy present to excite the light photon?

It is the latter....

 

[dryson]

Something has to stimulate the photon to become a photon otherwise it would not be a photon. Would certain wavelengths excite the photon to keep the photon in an energetic phase? The reason I ask above wavelengths is because if a photon travels outside of our Universe called Dryson World which is the Universe that you see before you and into the Lagrange point between the next Universe where there would not be any energy present would the photon lose its energy similar to how ice draws the heat from a burn area where the photon would then become dark matter or dark energy until such a time where the photon or mass of photons encounter wavelengths that would restart the photonic process or even cause something like the Big Bang to occur?

.and no I do not care if Einsteins theories say that this cannot happen. We haven't even colonized the Moon yet so how can Einstein's theories of how everything works be the end all to the study of the Universe>

 

[theridane]

As far as I know a photon that's already en-route can not be modified. You can't hit it with another photon to excite it. And even if you could, what exactly is an excited photon? Photons have direction and frequency, nothing else. Direction you can change, frequency - I don't know. Only by absorption and re-radiation.

Photons are radiated when a particle goes from a high energy state to a lower state. There is no photon at the beginning of another photon's life.

Dryson Universe, lagrange points, ice, dark matter .. you on meth?

 

[mental_avenger]

Dryson Universe, lagrange points, ice, dark matter .. you on meth?

Apparently he isn’t on “math”.

 

[PiotrSatan]

A photon does not have mass and, according to special relativity, MUST travel at the speed of light just like anything without mass must do. However, you can effect its speed of propagation through a medium. ie: Slow Light Work with Bose Einstein Condensates first achieved this, IIRC. Now, it is being achieved, reportedly, using standard materials.

I don't know what you mean about "excite the light photon."

Wait, I am probably wrong, but I just came across very crazy idea, so if F=mg then m=f/g right? So if there is no force reacting on you, you weigh nothing and therefore go with speed of light? Fail at math or fail at physics or unexplained physics is what I am mentioning?

 

[theridane]

Weight and mass are two completely separate ideas. Unfortunately they tend to blend together for those who are taught to use pounds as a measure of both mass (mass) and weight (force).

 

[MeteorWayne]

Qwik qwiz: Who knows what the unit of mass is in the English system? Pound is the unit of weight. (Also a unit of currency in the "other" Englsh system )

 

[dryson]

As far as I know a photon that's already en-route can not be modified. You can't hit it with another photon to excite it. And even if you could, what exactly is an excited photon? Photons have direction and frequency, nothing else. Direction you can change, frequency - I don't know. Only by absorption and re-radiation.

Photons are radiated when a particle goes from a high energy state to a lower state. There is no photon at the beginning of another photon's life.

Im thinking of the photon as being a particle. Would the photon then cease to exist thus transforming from a photon wavelength into a sinusoidal wave (My dad just farted on the couch and it smells like ten million years a space garbage)?

 

[theridane]

Qwik qwiz: Who knows what the unit of mass is in the English system? Pound is the unit of weight. (Also a unit of currency in the "other" Englsh system )

Stones and slugs? :lol:

Remids me of this Simpsons quote: "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"

 

[a_lost_packet_]

Qwik qwiz: Who knows what the unit of mass is in the English system? Pound is the unit of weight. (Also a unit of currency in the "other" Englsh system )

Whoa there Chief!

The last time someone went around talking about conversions between systems of measurements someone ended up spending millions of dollars to dump more space-junk on Mars...

Then again, maybe we should talk about conversions a bit more often.

 

[Kessy]

The thing is that the conventional states of matter - solid, liquid, gas and plasma - are based mainly on human experience with normal atomic matter here on Earth. When you start talking about very different conditions, or very different forms of matter, you can get very different sorts of behavior, and those states don't really apply that well.

For example, many materials have one or more critical points, temperatures and pressures where the distinction between two phases ceases to exist. A very common example of this is when there's no longer a difference between gas and liquid, typically at high temperature and pressure. You can find this sort of thing in the interior of gas giants.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are more phases of matter then just those four. Ordinary water has several different solid phases aside from normal ice, each of which has a distinct phase transition from the others. The liquid crystal in LCD is another example.

And then you get to things that aren't made of atoms and molecules which are usually hard to classify with the classical phases, such as neutron star material.

Photons are odd beasts, and behave very differently from any material you'd encounter in everyday life. You can think of photons as being "pure" energy, although I personally don't like that terminology. Don't think of them like tiny little balls or something like that, they only occasionally behave anything like that. A lot of the time they behave more like waves, and are actually an odd cross between a wave and a particle, but that's another long explanation. Aside from the wave particle duality, Relativity says that because of their nature photons *always* move at exactly c, relative to all other observers and all possible frames of reference, including other photons. So you could never "stick" photons together like atoms in a solid, because they're always moving at c relative to each other.

 

[unclefred]

Qwik qwiz: Who knows what the unit of mass is in the English system? Pound is the unit of weight. (Also a unit of currency in the "other" Englsh system )

Whoa there Chief!

The last time someone went around talking about conversions between systems of measurements someone ended up spending millions of dollars to dump more space-junk on Mars...

Then again, maybe we should talk about conversions a bit more often.

Slightly off topic but a_lost_packet said "The last time someone went around talking about conversions between systems of measurements someone ended up spending millions of dollars to dump more space-junk on Mars". I just want to make sure that he understands what happened.

At that time 3 spacecraft were being designed and built at the same time. Small thrusters on each were used to keep them correctly oriented. Because the thrusters can never be perfectly balanced pairs, every firing gives the needed rotational torque but also gives a very slight linear push. Over time and hundreds of firings the linear push can add up. The technical tern is "small forces". On previous missions the raw thruster firing data was sent to the ground. On these new missions better on board computers allowed the delta velocity to be computed computed then sent down. This was much more accurate. All 3 missions were controlled by JPL and the 3 navigation teams knew each other and were co-located at JPL. There were in the same building and probably on the same floor. 2 of the 3 missions used the new data but one of the JPL groups decided not to. That one group decided to use their old navigation software code thus forcing a ground software program to be written to take the new data and convert it backwards to get raw thruster firings.

The ground program had a metric/english conversion error. This should have been caught before launch. Several simulations were run and the data files sent to JPL. JPL replied that the data looked good. It was a lie. They never looked at the data. It turns out that it was not until months into the 9 month cruise to Mars that JPL was ever able to decode the data files and even read them. When they did get the format right, they realized there was something wrong but they never went back and read the test files or they would have discovered the error. You can say it was a conversion error but that is not the true reason.

 

[csmyth3025]

Thanks Unclefred for that explanation. I now see a realistic cause for the error. The usual "urban myth" story that an engineer forgot to convert feet into meters (or vice versa) seemed like an oversimplification to me.

Chris

 

[csmyth3025]

...So you could never "stick" photons together like atoms in a solid, because they're always moving at c relative to each other.

I read a Wikipedia article on pair production which can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production

The relevant quote from this article is:

Since the momentum of the initial photon must be absorbed by something, pair production cannot occur in empty space out of a single photon; the nucleus (or another photon) is needed to conserve both momentum and energy (consider the time reversal of Electron-positron annihilation).[1]

I'm trying to reconcile the idea that "...you could never 'stick' photons together..." with the concept of photon-photon pair production. So far I'm mystified. Can anyone shed some light on this process?
(I couldn't resist the pun)

Chris

 

[dryson]

The thing is that the conventional states of matter - solid, liquid, gas and plasma - are based mainly on human experience with normal atomic matter here on Earth. When you start talking about very different conditions, or very different forms of matter, you can get very different sorts of behavior, and those states don't really apply that well.

For example, many materials have one or more critical points, temperatures and pressures where the distinction between two phases ceases to exist. A very common example of this is when there's no longer a difference between gas and liquid, typically at high temperature and pressure. You can find this sort of thing in the interior of gas giants.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are more phases of matter then just those four. Ordinary water has several different solid phases aside from normal ice, each of which has a distinct phase transition from the others. The liquid crystal in LCD is another example.

And then you get to things that aren't made of atoms and molecules which are usually hard to classify with the classical phases, such as neutron star material.

Photons are odd beasts, and behave very differently from any material you'd encounter in everyday life. You can think of photons as being "pure" energy, although I personally don't like that terminology. Don't think of them like tiny little balls or something like that, they only occasionally behave anything like that. A lot of the time they behave more like waves, and are actually an odd cross between a wave and a particle, but that's another long explanation. Aside from the wave particle duality, Relativity says that because of their nature photons *always* move at exactly c, relative to all other observers and all possible frames of reference, including other photons. So you could never "stick" photons together like atoms in a solid, because they're always moving at c relative to each other.

So since light is a waveparticle could light be bent around in a circle pattern and continue to be propogated as a waveparticle?

 

[a_lost_packet_]

Slightly off topic but a_lost_packet said "The last time someone went around talking about conversions between systems of measurements someone ended up spending millions of dollars to dump more space-junk on Mars". I just want to make sure that he understands what happened.

Thanks for the info.

But, it was just a joke drawing on a popularized account as a source for humor...

At that time 3 spacecraft were being designed and built at the same time. Small thrusters on each were used to keep them correctly oriented. Because the thrusters can never be perfectly balanced pairs, every firing gives the needed rotational torque but also gives a very slight linear push. Over time and hundreds of firings the linear push can add up. The technical tern is "small forces". On previous missions the raw thruster firing data was sent to the ground. On these new missions better on board computers allowed the delta velocity to be computed computed then sent down. This was much more accurate. All 3 missions were controlled by JPL and the 3 navigation teams knew each other and were co-located at JPL. There were in the same building and probably on the same floor. 2 of the 3 missions used the new data but one of the JPL groups decided not to. That one group decided to use their old navigation software code thus forcing a ground software program to be written to take the new data and convert it backwards to get raw thruster firings.

The ground program had a metric/english conversion error. This should have been caught before launch. Several simulations were run and the data files sent to JPL. JPL replied that the data looked good. It was a lie. They never looked at the data. It turns out that it was not until months into the 9 month cruise to Mars that JPL was ever able to decode the data files and even read them. When they did get the format right, they realized there was something wrong but they never went back and read the test files or they would have discovered the error. You can say it was a conversion error but that is not the true reason.

... is not a joke so is constrained by normal conventions to be based on fact.

 

[csmyth3025]

So since light is a waveparticle could light be bent around in a circle pattern and continue to be propogated as a waveparticle?

In this regard you may be thinking of the way electrons are described as "wave packets" in the quantum description of electron orbitals in an atom (and in molecules, for that matter). I'm not sure if the same mathematics apply to photons since they are bosons (massless particles) rather than fermions (massive particles).

Chris

 

[Kessy]

So since light is a waveparticle could light be bent around in a circle pattern and continue to be propogated as a waveparticle?

Well, at a certain distance from a black hole outside the event horizon there's a place where the orbital velocity reaches c, so photons can get trapped in perpetual orbit around it, tho I don't think that's quite what you're thinking of. I'm not sure of the exact mechanics behind it, but I do know that recent research with materials has been able to make light do some amazing things, such as come to a near stop, or bend right around an object. (The "invisibility cloak" that was in the news a while back that works at radio frequencies.)

In this regard you may be thinking of the way electrons are described as "wave packets" in the quantum description of electron orbitals in an atom (and in molecules, for that matter). I'm not sure if the same mathematics apply to photons since they are bosons (massless particles) rather than fermions (massive particles).

I think that photons won't behave like electrons in that way because they have no electric charge, or any other quantum properties except for spin. Oh, and about the pair production - explaining that is honestly beyond my level of expertise, but I believe in that instance we're talking about photons interacting with each other, which would be like photons colliding, not "sticking together."

(I''m still waiting for the nitpickers to jump on me for using such a sloppy term as "sticking together." LOL)

 

[dryson]

No Kessy that is not what I meant but what I meant is if we look farther into the wavelength itself and the particles that make the wavelength up there has to be a point at which these particles will cease to operate at extreme cold temperatures. This would mean that the wavelength would be slowed down during its repition to the point of freezing or becoming less energetically active.

 

[MeteorWayne]

And that preposterous lack of understanding of physics is why this thread now resides in the Unexplained, my friends...

 

[dryson]

Go back to the cartoon world and leave people to ask their questions.

 

[MeteorWayne]

:lol: