Re: Sometimes I wonder, if Physicists actually *want* to know how it works

On May 8, 9:42 am, mpc755 <mpc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 8, 10:28 am, PD <TheDraperFam...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On May 8, 9:13 am, mpc755 <mpc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 8, 9:12 am, PD <TheDraperFam...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 8, 7:45 am, mpc755 <mpc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 8, 8:10 am, PD <TheDraperFam...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Something that is massless requires a medium in order to propagate.

That's an interesting remark. On what basis do you make that
assumption?

There are only two ways I know of that something can propagate.

Carry your own momentum (which requires mass).

Or propagate through a medium.

Then your catalog is a bit short.

Any physical entity's behavior is governed by laws that can be cast in
mathematical format.
One of the beauties of doing this is that you know that ANY solution
of those mathematical laws will be a behavior that naturally occurs..
In the case of light, those laws take the mathematical form that is
well-known and produces propagating wave solutions. Therefore we know
that light propagates.
This is ALL that is necessary.

It is tempting to say, "But that's just mathematics and doesn't
provide a mental conceptual image of what's physically going on." This
is true, but that does NOT entitle you to fetch one from your
collection of familiar mechanisms and to strap it on in ad hoc
fashion. This stands as much chance of being wrong as it does being
right.

What is furthermore true is that if you DO strap on one of these
conceptual physical mechanisms onto the propagating solution, that
will come with ancillary consequences. There are expected behaviors if
there is a mass. There are expected behaviors if there is a medium. If
those consequences do not match with experiment, then you've made an
error in your ad-hoc strapping on of the physical mechanism. The
mathematical behavior persists, but not on the basis of the conceptual
models you drew from. At that point, you have to allow the possibility
that there is a NEW conceptual physical mechanism that needs to be
added to your catalog.

PD

*How* does something that has no mass propagate through a void?

Maxwell's laws for the behavior of electric and magnetic fields says
that a time dependence in the electric field causes a spatial gradient
in the magnetic field, and a time dependence in the magnetic field
causes a spatial gradient in the electric field. From this, it doesn't
take too much sketching to see that the electric and magnetic fields
*themselves* can bootstrap this behavior into a traveling wave. It is
precisely this sketching that is done in freshman physics books for
engineers and scientists and almost any will do.

Maxwell himself didn't fully grip Faraday's notion of a field, and he
thought that they must be vortices in some "stuff" that permeates
everything. But some years after that, it dawned on him that this was
an extraneous assumption on his part that appealed to his common sense
and nothing more, and he wrote that he was now able to see that the
fields have a life of their own.

PD

For a field to be able to propagate through a void would require the
field to have mass.

WHY?

There is not a lick of evidence that the fields have mass.
There is *nothing* in the laws that govern the behavior of the fields
that mentions or even remotely resembles a mass.
The laws that govern the behavior of the fields are *completely
sufficient* to produce a solution that is a traveling wave, which then
is an expected behavior in observation.

What is the rationale for making this additional *assumption*?


http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Extras/Einstein_ether.html

Ether and the Theory of Relativity
by
Albert Einstein

"According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is
unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation
of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space
and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time
intervals in the physical sense."

.

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