Norman Albers

How does frequency dispersion (relationship) show in reflection? We know the first pane does two absorptions but also is the reflection off the outer pane strongly filtered also? If the glass passes green but absorbs other frequencies, is the reflection preferentially green? I guess so, sort of obviously (?)_ . . . .Then again, maybe Dak has it. Looking in daylight, the white window frame shows a green echo reflection, and if I look sideways it is even purple. Honest! . . . . . . . . .Dak, is this the low-E coating? This place was built in 2003.

If we are detecting entangled measurements many kilometers' distance, I'd think the two distances of observers from common source are not precisely the same. Do they need to be? To what, a wavelength??? We could use a tight timing restriction relative to a tested interval, and thus know when to gate open our detection, but this would not depend on equal path lengths. May I invite comments on this letter of today: "Entangled 'particles' I've heard of as being commonly either electrons or photons, and obviously the latter over long distances. What is so is that they come from a common 4-point and then propagate either inside or on the light-cone. Yet their resolution exists irrespective of communication between observers. What balances this is that no single observer can yet know the results until a light-speed signal resolves this." Just as you cannot sense photons going through one or another slit, once you measure entangled electrons you have changed the system. We must let go of the idea that we are simply determining what is there. We are part of the determination, not because of consciousness or any such anthropomorphism, but because measuring is process which disturbs or forces the original state.

Isn't that the point, namely that you cannot disturb, or 'measure' the field prior to the interference? One question: don't the slits have to be close together, in some wavelength measure? We work on such different scales. With a lab laser, scales are centimeters or meters. With stellar astronomy, scales are lightyears, so the Wheeler was able to say, photons interfere with their own paths on either side of galaxies. The angle here is small.

I am not convinced it is this simple. Granted that glass has greenish tint, meaning that green frequencies are passed preferentially. However, if I look at this candle through two, or even through four panes, it will not look green! I think duh fizziks is a bit more subtle, having to do with reflection. Clearly the second image comes from the rear plate of glass because as you move around the two images move distinctly, and because the second one is a bit smaller. . . . . . . . . . . .After a rousing tankful on the chainsaw, it strikes me that multiple reflection must be involved. Six or eight panes would start to create the color filtering seen. This must involve a series addition of weaker and weaker multiple reflections.

Hopefully so!

I guess so, given two passes through the first thickness. It's nicely spooky, as is spacetime.

I am settling into a new home and a candle is lit on the table. It looks orange and bright. It is nearly dark outside, and I see two reflections in the double-pane windows. The first is true to color; the second is a bit smaller, but pale green in color. Why is this tweaky image happening?

What do you mean "private"?

A "photon's frame" of reference is a trick question. I encountered this in my assumption of a localized wave packet with which I could "ride along" . Realizing I am a massive observer and really cannot, I felt it might be fair to describe an unchanging farfield wave-packet dependent upon vacuum field response. I 'simply' substituted [math] X=x-ct [/math] for the propagation dimension and 'did away with time'. This is unsettling at first to be sure, though it seems to be mathematically clean if you cop to what you are doing. The whole thing is larger than this understanding and I am struggling to see implications. We seem to conclude that spacetime is a "medium" of spacelike vibratory characteristics, which are variously excited. More when I get to spread out my papers on the desk in the house I just moved into...........

Lightpaths are null geodesics.

I doubt this. I enjoyed a six-month correspondence with Hal Puthoff (of PV theory) after he read my paper. He said he loosely considers the vacuum like an electron-positron plasma. Such a medium jiggles to propagate light. Just so we theoretically make them have no mass...

Don't you see the virtual field as you described it to be a medium? "Lorentz invariant" means your LOCAL physics does not change between relative states of velocity or gravitation.

Aren't you saying both things at the same time? The problem with "aether" is only if you consider it to comprise a massive field. Thus the "virtual quantum" ground state vacuum does, to my thinking (and to those in the Polarizable Vacuum school of thought), give support for the concept of a more subtle medium. It is Lorentz invariant and so fills the bill.

I think you state very well our predicaments in theory.

Now think about and explain the electric permittivity of the vacuum, and its magnetic permeability ( which I consider to be derivative) . Hang in here, folks. This is where theories collide.

General Relativity starts from and assumes a Lorentz metric form as the basis of spacetime, "far from sources".

We are working toward a synthesis of relativistic analyses of 'spacetime' and the quantum vacuum, which is not nothing!

A rather mild restriction.

Speech to the European Physical Society in 1977: Dirac: "The outline of Heisenberg's method was to set up a theory dealing with only observable quantities. These observable quantities fitted into matrices, so he was led to considering the matrix as a whole instead of just dealing with particular matrix elements. Dealing with matrices one is then directed to non-commutative algebra." Yes indeed, there is a very beautiful dance of mathematics with physical theory. Elas, thank you.

I am just really getting into quantum wave theory, but I'll hazard a guess about the structure of the problem. Look first at the classical field analysis, where by equating boundary conditions at the surface of two materials, you derive angle bending and also strength of transmission and reflection. I suspect that a quantum theorization derives a similar sum of possible paths, but interprets the intensity (squared) as probability that one photon will go somewhere. I am curious here to be sure: in a thread on 'wave packets' scalbers mentioned a thickness of dielectric material and quantum 'choice' of reflection/transmission. On the other hand I just read Feynman Lectures on his really classical treatment of reflections of a metallic surface. The first point is to distinguish between this, where the bulk of the material does not pass light, but the surface shows an imaginary index of refraction (to me this speaks of skin current); and a transmitting medium (a glass). In conversation a few days ago with solidspin he said, yes and we treat the Hamiltonian of the whole surface. Mathematically I am starting to wrap my head around the idea of quantum results being seen by accepting the reality of normal modes of the system. ]I have worked with these as a product of Fourier-transform on the system, and it's what you come up with in k-space is the complete set of 'analytic' modes, a basis set of physical possibilities. In either case, the condition of the surface is important. A good mirror has no variations on a scale comparable to the light you are considering, and this pertains to metal or glass. If you think of a specular source, say a pointed wall, the surface will have some characterization of "smoothness" and some bumpiness which will scatter light. Think now about the highway mirage in desert driving.

THIS IS JUST MAILED TO MY FRIEND 'solidspin': In the photon stuff, Finkelstein says: "Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton were already certain that light was granular in the 17th century but hardly anyone anticipated the radical conceptual expansions in the physics of light that happened in the 20th century. Now a simple extrapolation tells us to expect more such expansions. These expansions have one basic thing in common: Each revealed that the resultant of a sequence of certain processes depends unexpectedly on their order. Processes are said to commute when their resultant does not depend on their order, so what astounded us each time was a non-commutativity. Each such discovery was made without connection to the others, and the phenomenon of non-commutativity was called several things, like non-integrability, inexactness, anholonomy, curvature, or paradox (of two twins, or two slits). These aliases must not disguise this underlying commonality. Moreover the prior commutative theories are unstable relative to their non-commutative successors in the sense that an arbitrarily small change in the commutative commutation relations can change the theory drastically, but not in the non-commutative relations. Each of these surprising non-commutativities is proportional to its own small new fundamental constant..." He goes on and it is brilliant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "...There is a deeper commonality to these expansions. Like earthquakes and landslides they stabilize the region where they occur, specifically against small changes in the expansion constant itself. Each expansion also furthered the unity of physics in the sense that it replaced a complicated kind of symmetry (or group) by a simple one. " WOW, MAN, THIS IS FAR-SEEING.

Thanks ajb, I shall pursue what you are pointing to (Poynting to?)

Not to worry, babe. There are states in which energy hangs out.

Thinking about photons as distinct from atomic Schroedinger solutions, is there significance to [J(J+1)] as the square of total angular momentum (AM)? We deal with photons as "spin-1" entities and this describes the transfer of a component of AM, I think in the propagation vector sense. I can see in atoms, massive systems, how there are components rendering a diffference between any chosen quantized "z-component", but is the commutative relation here between "Jz" and JTOTAL^2 relevant in photon analysis?

In Wikipedia, 'Turing test:' "The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test." Yuri, thank you for sharing Wheeler's statement.