What Medium is Propagating Electromagnetic Waves?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Using the proton - antiproton example is just one of many particle - antiparticle examples is the creation of photons. What I get out of his hexagram type drawing from merging the proton - antiproton is the passage of light through space. I am a bit lost in how enough light can condense back into matter, have not hear that one before. Is this how the sun makes matter? Does open up the door for light speed transportation if this is the case.

How I currently understand the photon. A photon is released when an electron changes its orbit space. this results in a wave that propagates through all the other electrons. When a fire takes place there are many breaking of bonds going on with the electrons bouncing all over the place, generating light. When looking at the work of Ken, there is a connection between where a photon starts and where it ends.

originally posted by: kwakakev
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Using the proton - antiproton example is just one of many particle - antiparticle examples is the creation of photons. What I get out of his hexagram type drawing from merging the proton - antiproton is the passage of light through space. I am a bit lost in how enough light can condense back into matter, have not hear that one before. Is this how the sun makes matter? Does open up the door for light speed transportation if this is the case.

The problem is Ken Griggs didn't even hint that there were other things that made up photons aside from a proton and anti-proton, that's all he mentioned in that video. So what particles would make up a visible light photon, say of the color blue? It can't be made of a proton and anti-proton, nor even an electron positron combination, since either combination would have too much energy. There's also the problem that those particles have mass and the photon is thought to be massless.

The sun doesn't convert energy to matter, it does the opposite. One place you could say matter is coming from energy is in colliders like the LHC. Protons are collided which creates a quark-gluon plasma where the gluons are a form of energy, then in a process called hadronization, hadron particles (such as protons and neutrons) form from that quark-gluon plasma. Photons can also be created in that process, which is a different process for making photons than the one you mentioned.

If you want to create a particle-anti-particle pair from a high energy photon, you generally need that photon to interact with something else, then you can have "Pair production", such as an electron-positron pair if the energy of the photon is over 1.022 MeV.

How I currently understand the photon. A photon is released when an electron changes its orbit space.

That's one way a photon can form, but not the only way.

this results in a wave that propagates through all the other electrons.

You probably should have read the thread, nobody is suggesting that is how a photon propagates as far as I know.

The mainstream science view is that a photon can propagate just fine through the empty space-time we call the vacuum which experiments so far have not demonstrated to contain any ponderable media.

A non-mainstream, minority view is that maybe some medium exists for the photon to propagate, but we just haven't been able to measure it yet. But even that alternate view would not suppose that photons are propagating through a medium of electrons because if there were electrons in the vacuum, we would be able to measure them, and then it wouldn't be a vacuum. It would have mass because electrons have mass.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

One problem we have in testing your theory is in making a pure vacuum. Like in trying to reach absolute 0 we can get close, but that last little bit gets harder and harder. One problem I have come across is the appearance of subatomic matter and fluctuations within the supposed vacuum space.

Another consideration with how light moves through the electron field is that only electrons are affected by this. So it does not matter if the next closest electron is 1mm away or 10km away. How light can pas through the emptiness of space is an example of this. As one electron gets bounced around by the light, its closest neighbor in the direction of travel is the next one to transfer the signal.

Maybe there is other types of light as well. If an electron can support the movement of a photon, can a positron, proton and other subatomic elements with a charge? It is this charge that is at the core of the electromagnetic field.

Using the proton - antiproton example is just one of many particle - antiparticle examples is the creation of photons. What I get out of his hexagram type drawing from merging the proton - antiproton is the passage of light through space.

Sounds like someone who heard about vacuum polarization without really understanding it.

You can say that a photon decays to virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, which in turn annihilate to a photon. The problem here of course is that virtual particles are not real, but abstractions of the underlying math.

a reply to: moebius

In my current understanding of the photon, it is a form of energy rather than a form of matter. We can model some particle like behaviors of light through ray tracing and similar algorithms. The double slit experiment is clear evidence of the wave propagation properties of light.

Vacuum polarization presents an interesting theory with the presence of particle-antiparticle pairs to aid in the movement of light. Could it be that these pairs are what helps constitute space and only observable when something is going on? If there is a technology around that can alter the size of a space within an object then these pairs appear to be part of that fabric.

As I'm drunk and in the mood...

This thread is just wonderful!!!

I have no clue what your talking about and I'm pretty sure all of you got part of it right, the only thing most got wrong is the bickering... "said in a bickering voice"


I will have a deep dive when sober

Sincerely No Clue

originally posted by: kwakakev
a reply to: Arbitrageur

One problem we have in testing your theory is in making a pure vacuum. Like in trying to reach absolute 0 we can get close, but that last little bit gets harder and harder. One problem I have come across is the appearance of subatomic matter and fluctuations within the supposed vacuum space.

Another consideration with how light moves through the electron field is that only electrons are affected by this. So it does not matter if the next closest electron is 1mm away or 10km away.

On the contrary, it matters a great deal if you want to create a working model that can make predictions about what we observe. I think there is no way to model what you suggest where the distance to the next closest electron doesn't matter, though feel free to show a model that proves me wrong. I don't think you can model that in a way that matches observation.

Maybe there is other types of light as well. If an electron can support the movement of a photon, can a positron, proton and other subatomic elements with a charge?

A positron is the antiparticle of an electron, so the interactions would be symmetrically reversed based on the inverted charge. But I don't know of any "other types of light" related to positrons since the photon is thought to be its own antiparticle. The electromagnetic spectrum could be considered to have other types of light than visible light like infrared or UV but the other frequencies aren't because of positrons.

Protons can interact with EM radiation in say a plasma, but the reason electrons in the plasma have the dominant effects is because their charge to mass ratio is far greater than the protons since the electron mass is far less than the proton mass.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

The force of gravity has a zone where distance does not make any difference. Drop a ball at 1 meter or 10 kilometers up and is it going to fall at 9.8m^2. If we do go a lot further up there are limits, but there is a large zone where a consistent amount of energy is applied regardless of distance.

All the different frequencies of light are like a big piano, with the strength of the signal based on how hard you hit the key. It is cool how we can learn the composition of the stars by reading this song that is made and match it up to the elements on the Periodic table.

I have not come across protons interacting with the EM before, but it all makes sense. I assume that they are more in the higher frequencies (X and gamma rays) of the EM spectrum as they are bunched up smaller?

originally posted by: kwakakev
a reply to: Arbitrageur

The force of gravity has a zone where distance does not make any difference. Drop a ball at 1 meter or 10 kilometers up and is it going to fall at 9.8m^2. If we do go a lot further up there are limits, but there is a large zone where a consistent amount of energy is applied regardless of distance.

False, this graph from the wikipedia article on Earth's gravity isn't flat anywhere as you suggest, it's sloped. This is what the model predicts and is more or less what's measured after correcting for local gravitational anomalies where the rock density varies.

The graph shows the variation in gravity relative to the height of an object above the surface

Also, the Earth isn't much like an electron, or a photon, if that's the analogy you were trying to draw, since it's much more massive. However, the earth and an electron do have one thing in common, which is that the gravitational field of the earth and the electric field of the electron both fall off as the inverse square of the distance.

The distance always matters in both cases, so much that if the distance is doubled, the field has only 1/4 of the strength, and if distance is tripled, the field strength is only 1/9 as much and so on.

When you apply this inverse square concept to your electron example, "So it does not matter if the next closest electron is 1mm away or 10km away." 10km is ten million times as far away as 1mm, so the electric field strength of the closer electron per the inverse square law is 10 million times 10 million times greater, so it matters by 10 million times 10 million.

originally posted by: kwakakev
a reply to: Arbitrageur

The force of gravity has a zone where distance does not make any difference. Drop a ball at 1 meter or 10 kilometers up and is it going to fall at 9.8m^2. If we do go a lot further up there are limits, but there is a large zone where a consistent amount of energy is applied regardless of distance.

Except this is absolutely not true, The acceleration due to gravity decreases with distance from centre of mass and local density of the column below. Taking the Earth's mean values, the acceleration due to gravity at a height of 1 meter is 9.81 m/s^2 (get your units right, if you don't it undermines what you are talking about) at a altitude of 10 km, this acceleration reduces to 9.78 m/s^2. What it tells you is that the acceleration due to gravity changes as a function of height, as you expect it to based upon newtonian physics.

All the different frequencies of light are like a big piano, with the strength of the signal based on how hard you hit the key. It is cool how we can learn the composition of the stars by reading this song that is made and match it up to the elements on the Periodic table.

I have not come across protons interacting with the EM before, but it all makes sense. I assume that they are more in the higher frequencies (X and gamma rays) of the EM spectrum as they are bunched up smaller?

The top part is not quite right... photons being quantized, the signal strength isn't at all about how hard you hit a key. it is that hitting a key produces multiples of photons with the same wavelength. There isn't really a concept of 'how hard' you hit it in waveforms like you might experience with sound waves. This is where this whole concept and analogy becomes problematic... because people seem determined to be fixed on the idea that a wave is a wave and thus identical. In reality this makes no sense since we can already observe that waves that travel on the surface of water and not the same as waves that travel through the air as sound. But this doesn't stop people who are determined to fix their world view.

The elements on the periodic table don't really have a song, more they have a characteristic interactions with light either by emission or absorption as directly dependant upon the quantization of energy and atomic structure. A lovely little note that Helium is called such, because scientists worked out there was a probable missing element in the periodic table which should be at a proton number of 2. They observed it in the spectrum of the sun, and so named it after the god of the sun, Helios. The element was isolated years later.


Particle physics is an interesting field though requires some dedication to understanding mechanisms which don't lend themselves very well to real world analogies. Proton-Antiproton annihilation to produce energy is not a clean process due to the proton being a composite particle. Each is composed of 3 valence quarks bound by gluons, each proton also has a non-zero probability of having bound 'sea' quarks, virtual quarks also bound by gluons that are a rest frame representation of the total energy of the particle. A proton encountering an anti-proton would typically involve the interaction of a quark-antiquark pair and produce a gluon.

The Remaining quarks and gluon have to stablize, either by reproducing the quarks in the same rest frame (rare to impossible) or will more commonly produce a complex series of interactions known as Hadronization. In this process proton and anti-proton are fragmented by the presence of a high energy gluon. In order to conserve colour charge the gluon and quarks will produce high energy mesons to carry away the momentum (Hadrons can also be produced). These mesons are unstable and the process will also typically produce multiple such particles in a shower like affect, conserving energy and momentum. Ultimately though they will decay until reaching the form of gamma rays- positrons/electrons/neutrinos all of which (with the exception of neutrinos) you can detect in a particle physics detector.

While that was a long long explanation, it is a taste of the reality. There is no 'clean' way to produce particles or photons from annihilation of protons and anti-protons on the bases of the physics around it.


Even the ALPHA experiment that produces, contains and does experiments with anti-hydrogen observes this affect when the anti-hydrogen interacts with residual gas or escapes the trap. The observe 511keV back to back photons as the positron annihilates, and then a bunch of Pions as the antiproton interacts.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

There is a lot about gravity that is still confusing in our physics framework. In terms of bring it back to how a photon can pass through seemingly large gaps in space, I see some correlation with this movement of energy. We are seeing light from billions, trillions years ago traveling through some pretty empty space at times. It must be able to do this somehow.

Inverse square concept, yeah important one. The wave decays at a rate proportional to the surface area. I do not exactly know just how empty space can get, 100 atoms per cubic meter is a guess. Enough to allow the fabric of deep space to hold it together for the light signals to pass through. This is proven by our perceptions of the stars and investigations into deep space.

So we pick some atom out in deep space, it's nearest neighbor about 10 cm away, maybe? We have charged electrons and protons creating a field throughout the space around it, if we invert all the charges we have antimatter. The combined charge of all the quantum elements extends at the inverse square rule. The signal strength does drop of quickly, technically it extends infinitely. Growing into a weaker signal over time, it eventually gets lost in the noise of the universe.

But when we are out in deep space where things are a lot quieter, a weaker signal has a better chance to be picked up and carried on. It is somewhere within all the combined quantum charges and the electromagnetic field that is generated that lights moves through.

a reply to: ErosA433

Thank you for fixing up my mistakes, had a public school education.

Photons being quantized. This does help us measure and define what is going on. The smallest value I know to start a photon is when an electron drops its orbit space. This takes out the small quanta of energy from the atomic unit and expresses it as a shock wave throughout the electromagnetic field. Different elements have different shapes with their electromagnetic fields producing various colors.

Once we have a photon started the medium of travel is the electromagnetic field of the atom. With the negative charge of the electron on the outside of the atom, this is where most of the photon movement takes place. Put in enough energy and things get complicated. You done a good effort trying to explain it.

There is no 'clean' way to produce particles or photons from annihilation of protons and anti-protons on the bases of the physics around it.

Does this support a conclusion that the electrons are responsible for photons and their movement rather than protons? If you can smash open a proton and it does not produce any photons, it does suggest that some other kind of energy is going on there. And there is, gamma rays.

a reply to: kwakakev

you seem to have a few concepts rather mixed up on the basis of our current understanding, so speculating on fundamentals is fraught with difficulty. It is hard to speculate with you on some of these questions because you specifically don't appear to have a good level basis of how particles and waves work.

So ill try and quote a few points and see how far we get

Inverse square concept, yeah important one. The wave decays at a rate proportional to the surface area. I do not exactly know just how empty space can get, 100 atoms per cubic meter is a guess. Enough to allow the fabric of deep space to hold it together for the light signals to pass through. This is proven by our perceptions of the stars and investigations into deep space.

An important one you dont appear to understand in the current framework. A photon, as far as we understand, doesn't decay. what give us the inverse square law is spherical dispersion of a source. A star produces light in all directions. If we look at flux, we are looking at the number of photons passing through an area of 1m2 for example from a set distance. Now if you increase the distance from the star by a factor of 2 compared to the photons you observe per 1m2 goes down by a factor of 4 because the area of the sphere increased by a factor of 4.

If you do the same with a laser, you will get a different answer. If you have a perfect, exactly focused laser which comes out of the source with zero dispersion, it will have the same flux regardless of distance.

What else we have going on in space is attenuation and scattering, which is from interstellar gas absorbing or scattering light out of the line of sight.

As i said before, photons are particle like with a waveform like property but are not physically a wave that decays.


On the density of space, its hard to say exactly but numbers range from 2-5 particles per cubic meter (not including photons and neutrinos) to several handfuls dependant upon where you are. The concept of a 'fabric' you appear to want to have in your model as being something with mechanical properties. it doesn't have to have that one but, space-time may simply be entirely a baseline for the existence of fields, but even this is getting a little abstract. It doesn't appear to require the presence of particles to propagate field properties.

So we pick some atom out in deep space, it's nearest neighbor about 10 cm away, maybe? We have charged electrons and protons creating a field throughout the space around it, if we invert all the charges we have antimatter. The combined charge of all the quantum elements extends at the inverse square rule. The signal strength does drop of quickly, technically it extends infinitely. Growing into a weaker signal over time, it eventually gets lost in the noise of the universe.

But when we are out in deep space where things are a lot quieter, a weaker signal has a better chance to be picked up and carried on. It is somewhere within all the combined quantum charges and the electromagnetic field that is generated that lights moves through.

It is not at all clear what you are trying to express here. All i see without wanting to appear snarky is a mish mash of words which don't appear to coherently describe either a concept, problem or statement. The only part that half does is the last of the first paragraph where you appear to be getting your head around the idea that, a field produced by a physical particle, conceptually extends to long distances, and in truth what ever passes as infinity, although the field strength or influence of the particle at long distance is very very small. This is true, however you cannot simply state "Quantum elements" as it isn't really clear what you are addressing or trying to state.

But when we are out in deep space where things are a lot quieter, a weaker signal has a better chance to be picked up and carried on. It is somewhere within all the combined quantum charges and the electromagnetic field that is generated that lights moves through.

and then here again you appear to be stating that you think photons require electrons and protons, charged particles in general to propagate or even exist... physics tells us that this simply isn't the case. If it was required in some way, it would mean photons cannot travel in straight paths, yet we know they do... unless scattered.

Once more it is hard to really state the something is confusing in the framework of physics when you appear not to understand or know what our framework of physics actually is. Gravity and the passage of photons is only passively related in that gravity can alter what an external observer might perceive as a straight path, it can also have some interesting effects that shift the observed energy also.

How a photon can pass through seemingly large gaps in space... firstly space doesn't really have gaps, it has regions of higher particle density and regions of lower particle density, all parts of space appears to also be filled with fields, so there are no gaps so to speak. Secondly, i really have no idea what you are saying about correlation with movement of energy.

The framework we work within states that a photon, is energy. It is the excitation of the electromagnetic field that manifests are a stable particle state that carries momentum and does not couple to the higgs mechanism in order to give it the property of mass. It is thus a massless charge-less particle. I am not going to talk about isospin because this will just confuse things further. That is what a photon is, it's wavelike nature is a property that all particles appear to exhibit as an underpinning of quantum mechanics. By vertue of this particle having zero mass, it moves at what we believe is the universes speed limit, or the phase velocity of the universe so to speak, which is C, the speed of light. That is the framework.

Sorry to repeat and seemingly double post but you need to understand what is within the current framework before expressing or discussing concepts that are as yet unproven as though they are reality.

Photons being quantized. This does help us measure and define what is going on. The smallest value I know to start a photon is when an electron drops its orbit space.

What you describe is emission from atomic physics, namely the electron orbitals so far, so good

This takes out the small quanta of energy from the atomic unit and expresses it as a shock wave throughout the electromagnetic field. Different elements have different shapes with their electromagnetic fields producing various colors.

No, to be precise i want to be careful with terminology. The energy of the photon comes from the energy difference of the two orbital states the electron moved between. it does not come from the 'atomic unit'. Atomic units are the masses of the nucleons, the emission of photons as you described above does not come from the nucleons.
The photon produced is also not a shockwave, it is an excitation of the electromagnetic field which is stable and propagates. It is a single particle with wavelike properties but it is still a particle. Different elements have different electron orbitals which fill up dependant upon how many protons they have (determines how many electrons they stably hold until neutral) This gives rise to the difference in energy difference between electron orbitals. It can get even more complex when dealing with molecules which can do exactly the above too. The 'colour' is the energy. The energy scale from low to high is lowest are radio waves, and highest are gamma rays.

Once we have a photon started the medium of travel is the electromagnetic field of the atom. With the negative charge of the electron on the outside of the atom, this is where most of the photon movement takes place. Put in enough energy and things get complicated. You done a good effort trying to explain it.

No... once you produce the stable excitation of the electromagnetic field, thats all you need, you don't need atom at all. Atoms and charged particles are not required to propagate or mediate the movement of photons.

a reply to: ErosA433

What I am trying to do is define the medium that EM wave propagate. I first meet neutronflux in another thread and can see he has a good heart. There is lots of confusion around so any clarity helps.

To understand the EM field it helps to understand the electron. We define and measure it by a point is space, but there is more to it as the inverse square rule applies again. This allows the electrons to position themselves around the nucleus. The lowest electron orbit is defined by Absolute 0, the coldest it can get. As things warm up the electrons moves into higher orbits.

Infrared vision detects temperature and the variations between electron orbits in a field of view.

Human vision detects photon emission when an electron lowers its orbit. When a photon hits its destination, the energy is absorbed with an electron raising its electron orbit. To balance the energy, another electron (maybe the same) drops it orbit and produces a new photon with its own element color and temperature. This is how we perceive different colors.

Radio waves move through the same medium, but has it frequency and color set by the source signal. A metal antenna is required to send and receive these photons.

Gamma rays also move through the same medium. The source for these photons is from the protons.

The photon produced is also not a shockwave, it is an excitation of the electromagnetic field which is stable and propagates. It is a single particle with wavelike properties but it is still a particle

Hmmm. I do agree excitation is a part, but without mass or charge you are pushing it a bit to call a photon a particle. When looking at how an ocean wave propagates, it is every water particle transferring the energy of the wave by cycling in rhythm, not just one or some water particle pushing through it all.

originally posted by: kwakakev
a reply to: ErosA433

What I am trying to do is define the medium that EM wave propagate.

If you want to have a productive discussion about that, it would be helpful if you could frame it from the perspective of the thousands of scientists who have worked on that problem since the time of Maxwell and his important work on electromagnetism. But your entire post seems to show no appreciation for or understanding of all the work done on this problem since 1900.

When looking at how an ocean wave propagates, it is every water particle transferring the energy of the wave by cycling in rhythm, not just one or some water particle pushing through it all.

If we were having this discussion in the 1890s, this would be a reasonable way of thinking about electromagnetic waves, comparing them to other types of waves, like waves in fluids or solids. But one problem back then was scientists knew that in solids, the velocity of sound waves was proportional to the stiffness and inversely proportional to the density.

So if you want to follow this analogy of comparing electromagnetic waves to other types of waves, from what we knew about the speed of waves, to get a very high speed like the speed of light, you would need a medium which was very stiff yet had such low density we call it a vacuum. If you haven't read the thread, please at least read Einstein's explanation of this problem and the other things that happened up to 1920 to get you up to speed with his thoughts in 1920 (see links below), and after that you might want to look at the additional experiments conducted to look for a medium that can propagate EM radiation, with more sensitive experiments still finding no evidence of a medium

Then after that, if you understand what experiments have been performed, maybe we can have a discussion about what the you think the scientists may have missed in their experiments, but we seem to be nowhere near having such a discussion at this point until you learn more about the scientific work already done.

Here are links to the two posts I made about Einstein's comments in 1920 about a medium for EM waves. Please read what he says, paying particular attention to the extreme difficulties scientists encountered when trying to propose properties of a medium that would have a speed as fast as light has in a vacuum, when they tried to compare light waves to other types of waves as you are trying to do:

Ether and the Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein Part 1
Ether and the Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein Part 2

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I agree with everything you are saying, just trying to explain it in am more user friendly way. The Stationary Luminiferous Ether fits with the medium extending the electron.

originally posted by: kwakakev
The Stationary Luminiferous Ether fits with the medium extending the electron.

I know what an electron is and about its electric field and other properties, but I have no idea what that sentence means. I also don't know if you're talking about free electrons, or electrons that are part of neutral atoms.

Free electrons are not hard to detect, for example you can apply an electric field and accelerate the electron toward a screen to make images like the old CRT monitors and television sets.

If you think the electrons are part of neutral atoms or molecules, then the electric field doesn't accelerate molecules with an overall neutral charge, but there other things you can do to study the electrons and the molecules they are a part of. One approach was discussed by Lorentz in his 1902 Nobel Prize speech, and his thought process seems very scientific to me in trying to think of ways to characterize the nature of the luminiferous ether:

The theory of electrons and the propagation of light

Permit me now to draw your attention to the ether. Since we learnt to consider this as the transmitter not only of optical but also of electromagnetic phenomena, the problem of its nature became more pressing than ever. Must we imagine the ether as an elastic medium of very low density, composed of atoms which are very small compared with ordinary ones? Is it perhaps an incompressible, frictionless fluid, which moves in accordance with the equations of hydrodynamics, and in which therefore there may be various turbulent motions? Or must we think of it as a kind of jelly, half liquid, half solid?

Clearly, we should be nearer the answers to these questions if it were possible to experiment on the ether in the same way as on liquid or gaseous matter. If we could enclose a certain quantity of this medium in a vessel and compress it by the action of a piston, or let it flow into another vessel, we should already have achieved a great deal.

So when you talk about either free electrons or even electrons as components of neutral molecules, these ideas make sense to me because we know we can enclose a quantity matter like gas molecules, and compress the gas, and then measure the different properties after compression. But alas all such experiments to treat the ether as if it was made of such things never yielded any results, which is one reason we don't suspect there's an ether made of electrons or gas molecules containing electrons:

Unfortunately, all the experiments undertaken on these lines have been unsuccessful; the ether always slips through our fingers.

So if you think there is an ether composed of something known like electrons, that idea is not consistent with techniques such as Lorentz described which would be able to detect known things like electrons or gas molecules.

So then Lorentz came up with this conclusion in 1902 that whatever the ether was, it wasn't known matter of which electrons were a type of known matter at the time though atomic theory was still in its infancy:

Having reached this point, we can consider the ether as a substance of a completely distinctive nature, completely different from all ponderable matter. With regard to its inner constitution, in the present state of our knowledge it is very difficult for us to give an adequate picture of it.

So in 1902, he and other scientists wanted to believe it, but they could test for ordinary types of matter like electrons and it didn't seem to be any of those, so he concludes it has to be something else.

After that the development of atomic theory progressed, and much more was learned about the nature of matter, with improved techniques to detect various types of matter, further ruling out the ether as any type of ordinary matter.

After theory showed that no ether was necessary for the propagation of light, that combined with the fact that no experiments could find any evidence for luminiferous ether let most scientists to drop the idea of ether and just say that theory shows it's not needed.

Lorentz was one of the holdouts who clung to the idea that there was some kind of ether but even he could tell you as far back as 1902 that it couldn't be composed of known materials like electrons.

I still see mainstream scientists saying we haven't conclusively proven Lorentz wrong since experimentally the results of his ether idea are indistinguishable from the experimental results of relativity. But I think even those scientists would agree with Lorentz that if there's a ether, it can't be made of ordinary matter like electrons, because we know too much about electrons and how to detect them.

originally posted by: kwakakev
a reply to: ErosA433
Hmmm. I do agree excitation is a part, but without mass or charge you are pushing it a bit to call a photon a particle.

And this is part of the issue, you are coming at this discussion with the admission that you don't know the fine details, and are throwing away the actual details when given to you. The total energy of a particle is given by the invariant mass equation.

E^2 = P^2C^2 +M^2C^4

this equation appears to hold regardless of frame of reference. It also stands up to unit analysis. P is the momentum of the particle, C is the speed of light and M is the mass.

A photon, a zero mass particle basically gives you

E = PC

in wave particle duality, from the de Broglie relation is that wavelength lambda = h / P where h is the plank constant and p is the momentum... this gives us the relation

E = hC/lambda , and out drops the relationship between Energy and the photon wavelength.

So to say conceptually it is problematic for a particle to have zero mass, you are basically as Arbitrageur said... denying the more than a century of work.

It is kinda like learning a new language here. So many names, terms, relationships and expressions of understanding. I understand most of it, but some is cloudy. Use heaps of different equations and algorithms when programming, so finding the right one for the right application helps.

E = PC

In an international setting and using it regularly it works.

Energy = Momentum x Lightspeed

Helps introduce context to the relationship and easier to program with.

It appeared beyond question that light must be interpreted as a vibratory process in an elastic, inert medium filling up universal space. It also seemed to be a necessary consequence of the fact that light is capable of polarisation that this medium

This is the part of the Stationary Luminiferous Ether that i could relate to. It does go on to talk about something solid, which I currently perceive as the electron. I am not sure where we are up to in defining all of its movements. Bounces around in a clouded area of probability last I heard. It is the negative charge of the electron that I see carrying the photon. This is why gamma rays can use it too, they have a charge too.