SmileyUK

Ahh... but 'given the conditions' means including the non-existant 'perfect reflective surface'... which I think everyone agrees doesn't/can't exist. This is just a way around losing any stored photons that interact with the surface material used in the sphere... iirc it's called Compton Scattering, but I could be wrong. The sphere was originally 5 inches, or about 12 1/2 cm (1.25x10^-2 m)in diameter... and as the initial inquiry was about storing light, then the photons would be from the visible spectrum with wavelengths between 380 and 760 nm (3.8 to 7.6x10^-7 m)... easily large enough. My saying the photons will bounce around forever isn't based on any experiment I could cite... but M31 "The Andromeda Galaxy" is the most distant visible object in the night sky, and that's over 2 million light years away... so photons from that source have been around longer that humans, so I figure any proof to contradict me won't happen until WAY after I'm too dead to care

A well ventilated bedroom, I hope... you do know what solder-flux fumes wil do to you? Who cares... there's more than enough programming available on Digital/Cable/Satelite that it's already at saturation point... just let the demonic little ankle-biters sit and stare goggle-eyed for hours. At least they're quiet and not throwing rocks at my windows!

I apologise, then... I was under the impression you had labled a laser as emitting "coherent" light which, as I understood it, means... "maintains a near-constant phase relationship" ... and it looked like you were contradicting yourself. Swansont... re-read the entire thread, then re-read your own post... then come back with an intelligent thought. x__heavenly__x... given the conditions, nothing happens to the light in the sphere. It'll just keep bouncing around inside the sphere until something changes the conditions... that could be as simple as 'opening' it... in which case almost all the 'stored' light will leave the sphere in less time than it would take for your brain to register the popping noise of you breaking the vacuum seal. If you want to know 'how much' light you can 'fit' into the sphere, then you'll have to... ... work out how big a photon is (something I neither know or wish to know)... ... work out how closely you can 'pack photons together' before they affect each other... ... find a way to 'force feed light' into a fixed volume faster than than it can escape... ... credit me on a few of the huge number of papers you, and your descendants, could write on this subject over the course of the next few hundred years

That's just a description of what a laser IS... not what it DOES... and isn't very helpful unless you already understand what the words 'coherent', 'stimulated' and 'emission' mean in that context. For someone whose sig. claims to rail against one theocracy, you seem to be content to keep science at the level of a religion where only a chosen few understand the 'secret words'... with yourself, of course, being one of the chosen few.

I'd always thought that lights properties were pretty well understood. Assuming a pure vacuum, perfect reflective coat, no leaks and no outside influence, then it's easy to predict how any light inside the sphere will behave... and also how long it would take to exhaust the 'reservior'.

My analogy above about the 'weak laser' was bad and has probably confused the issue. Lasers don't focus, they filter... the point of a laser is that it produces light that's exactly (or very close to) a particular colour/wavelength. Once you've got a beam of a certain wavelengh, you can control it with a higher degree of accuracy, because you can work out details like focusing with more precision. Whatever... it's probably a lot cheaper and easier to just buy a candle and a box of matches than invent a lightsphere

I don't think it's possible to 'fill' the 'sphere' in the first place... Any photon entering the sphere will just be reflected back along its path to the source when it hits the reflective surface... and all you've created is a very weak laser that requires constant pumping for no benefit.

How is it possible to generate enough energy to maintain a Quantum Wormhole on a Macro scale? Background: I vaguely remember watching an edition of Horizon on UK television. It was basically Kip Thorn and Stephen Hawkins talking about the possibility of using scaled up Quantum Wormholes as a means of FTL travel, and by extension, Time Travel. The program tried to say that if such a Wormhole could be created, a person could enter it at one end, and instantly emerge at the other... queue pics of one half of intrepid explorer poking his head out of one portal while his feet and legs stuck out another portal like a 'sawing the woman in half' magic trick. All I could think of was "that can't work... if you had two ends of a wormhole above each other, you could stick a water wheel between the two ends, pour a bucket of water in one hole, and watch it drop out of the upper hole, across the wheel, and into the lower hole forever... free energy!" So what am I missing? The 'potential energy' between the two ends of the wormhole must be infinite... so you must have to generate MORE than that to create the wormhole in the first place. Does that make sense? Or is my education getting in the way? Thanks go to YT2095 for pointing me to these forums... blame him for any confusion