Vinaire's Blog

My “disturbance hypothesis of light” is far from complete but it is being egged on with help from some very intelligent friends. The following comment from Mark has helped me flesh out some of the ideas in more coherent form.

Comment from MarkNR

My response:

Yes, there are transverse and longitudinal waves. When you flip a rope, the wave that travels over it is transverse. When you play with a slinky, the wave that travels through it is longitudinal.

The ripples on the surface of water in a pool are of transverse nature. But the sound waves that travel through water or air are of longitudinal nature. The electromagnetic waves are thought to be transverse.

You are right in that a transverse wave seems to be a “surface” phenomenon, whereas, longitudinal wave seems to be a “volume” phenomenon. I never looked at it that way before. But it makes sense.

If electromagnetic waves are transverse in nature then are they traveling at the interface of two very different media? Well, we have electrical and magnetic fields associated with this phenomenon. So, an electromagnetic wave may somehow travel in a medium that easily separates into an electric and a magnetic field.

I have been thinking that the electromagnetic waves are to some degree discrete in nature even at very low frequencies. Let’s call such a discrete wave packet of some arbitrarily number of wavelengths a photon.  In that case, a photon will be very long and snakelike at low frequencies, but it will get shorter and more compact as the wavelengths become shorter at higher frequencies.

At the level of electrons, the frequency within the “photon” is high enough to display mass properties due to its compactness. The electron appears like a particle. But it is still spread over some distance to display appreciable wavelike properties.

At the level of proton, however, the frequency within the “photon” is extremely high to make it appear more like a particle than a wave. Its “spread” is very small. At the level of neutron, I believe that the “photon” becomes still more compact such that the charge property gets converted to mass property completely.

This seems to indicate that there is some relationship between the charge and mass. I am trying to define that relationship in terms of “disturbance levels”. A neutron is a really compact “disturbance”. A proton is less so. And an electron displays still lesser compactness of disturbance. What is being disturbed is a primeval field, which appears as “electromagnetic” upon disturbance.

What you are talking about is the corpuscular theory of light that Newton favored. However, Maxwell’s research supported the wave theory of light. I believe that the truth is somewhere in between. I am trying to express my understanding in terms of “disturbance levels” of a primeval field. Such disturbances appear to be increasingly discrete as they gradually become more compact with increasing frequency.

I am simply postulating a primeval field whose inherent nature is yet to be discovered, but the disturbance of which is “electromagnetic” in nature. A disturbance may be looked in terms of having a frequency even when there is nothing vibrating but only a repeating pattern of disturbance.

The notion of “particle” seems to come from the notion of “spread of disturbance” as it becomes compact. The disturbance levels simply lay out a gradient of this “spread”, which becomes increasingly compact. The more compact this disturbance is the better defined its position is in space as a particle.

Your “puffs of smoke” analogy is very apt. It is a concrete rendition of the abstract patterns of “disturbances in vacuum”. Thank you.

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We assume an electron to be like a Ping-Pong ball. We then apply the Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty to its location around the nucleus of an atom. This is Quantum reality.

Why can’t we assume an electron be like a piece of wave that extends in space like a snake. Then we can do away with the Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. That would fit more with the classical reality.

Einstein was opposed to Quantum reality. He would have preferred this snake analogy for an electron. The following ia a quote from the excellent book EINSTEIN – HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE by Walter Isaacson, Chapter 20, Quantum Entanglement.

Einstein’s fundamental dispute with the Bohr-Heisenberg crowd over quantum mechanics was not merely about whether God rolled dice or left cats half dead. Nor was it just about causality, locality, or even completeness. It was about reality. Does it exist? More specifically, is it meaningful to speak about a physical reality that exists independently of whatever observations we can make? “At the heart of the problem,” Einstein said of quantum mechanics, “is not so much the question of causality but the question of realism.”

Bohr and his adherents scoffed at the idea that it made sense to talk about what might be beneath the veil of what we can observe. All we can know are the results of our experiments and observations, not some ultimate reality that lies beyond our perceptions.

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But Einstein seems to be protesting against what he himself contributed to with his idea of photon and his Theory of Relativity.

It seems that quanta of light (photons) shall be packets made up of finite number of wavelengths. In that case, a photon will also be shaped more like a snake than a Ping-Pong ball. If the number of wavelengths per photon is constant then low-energy ELF photons shall be like very long snakes, and high-energy gamma photons shall be like very short snakes. We may then call very long snakes as waves, and very short snakes as particles.

Furthermore, Einstein denied any need of a medium for light. He denied the Newtonian absoluteness of space and time but replaced it by the absoluteness of the speed of light, thus upsetting the reality of classical physics. But Einstein seemed to backtrack from his mathematical reality later in life.

The above quote continues as follows.

Einstein had displayed some elements of this attitude in 1905, back when he was reading Hume and Mach while rejecting such unobservable concepts as absolute space and time. “At that time my mode of thinking was much nearer positivism than it was later on,” he recalled. “My departure from positivism came only when I worked out the general theory of relativity.”

From then on, Einstein increasingly adhered to the belief that there is an objective classical reality. And though there are some consistencies between his early and late thinking, he admitted freely that, at least in his own mind, his realism represented a move away from his earlier Machian empiricism. “This credo,” he said, “does not correspond with the point of view I held in younger years.” As the historian Gerald Holton notes, “For a scientist to change his philosophical beliefs so fundamentally is rare.”

Einstein’s concept of realism had three main components:

1. His belief that a reality exists independent of our ability to observe it. As he put it in his autobiographical notes: “Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought independently of its being observed. In this sense one speaks of ‘physical reality.’ ”

2. His belief in separability and locality. In other words, objects are located at certain points in spacetime, and this separability is part of what defines them. “If one abandons the assumption that what exists in different parts of space has its own independent, real existence, then I simply cannot see what it is that physics is supposed to describe,” he declared to Max Born.

3. His belief in strict causality, which implies certainty and classical determinism. The idea that probabilities play a role in reality was as disconcerting to him as the idea that our observations might play a role in collapsing those probabilities. “Some physicists, among them  myself, cannot believe,” he said, “that we must accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance.”   

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What happened in 1905 was that mathematical reality replaced physical reality starting with the Theory of Relativity. This has continued with Quantum Mechanics even to this date. The article The Philosophy of Cosmology attempts to reverse this trend and reestablish the realism of physical reality.

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