arachnid

Thanks Organism You are quite correct about non-propagating photons. And I was wrong to omit the 'time' from space time. What I was getting at is that a photon is the result of the interaction of magnetic and electric fields. My question about force fields still stands. However, I am particularly interested in the first question: Is it both valid and useful to model a magnetic or electric field as causing space time curvature for charged particles? I understand that such a curvature would not effect matter without charge. Thanks

Hi, I am currently living in Wales, UK, but I am from the US. My background is in engineering, mainly industrial and systems engineering. Industrial engineering conjures up images of people with stop watches prowling dark satanic mills at the behest of evil capitalists seeking to make us into their wage slaves. Now-a-days, industrial engineering is all about statistics, operations research, mathematical modeling, and human factors engineer and ergonomics. Industrial engineers can be found working in just about any business or technical field. My specialties are program (or programme in the UK) management, and performance measurement and modeling. I have an abiding interest in physics. I recently finished Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's book titled "Why does E=MC Squared and Why Should We Care" I recommend it as a very readable introduction to relativity. I was so impressed, I bought another book by the two authors on quantum physics. I understand that quantum physics is spectacularly successful, but it leaves me feeling that it is all too artificial. The math may agree very well with experimental results, but it doesn't seem to explain very much about what is actually happening. I know it is said that a desire to understand what is happening in quantum mechanics is unnecessary and counter-productive, but I refuse to accept that. Fortunately, I don't use QM in my work so I can afford to take that extreme view.

"According to what I've read about magnetic fields, all they're described as are imaginary lines around the magnet that depict the area where the magnet has effects upon. What exactly is a magnetic field? And how is the attraction caused?" I also have some questions about magnetic and electric fields. Answers that invoke Maxwell's vector field equations are only telling us how charges and fields behave, not what they are. The idea of virtual photons clearly comes from the field of quantum mechanical and particle physics. I'm not qualified to judge the validity of the virtual photon model. Like many aspects of quantum physics, the mathematics may 'work' in the sense that it agrees with experiments but it doesn't give any insights into what the thing 'is'. One of the things I appreciate about the general relativity is that at least there is some indication about what a gravitational field is; namely a distortion of space. You may say that distorted space is still abstract but it is less abstract than quantum mechanics which doesn't even attempt to give insight into what a field is. I look at a magnet levitating above another magnet with a gap of a few centimeters and wonder what the heck is going on in the gap. I have two questions: 1. Could the idea of distorted space be applied to other force fields? Can a magnetic field, for example, be modeled as a spatial distortion? 2. A pair of force fields are required to create a propagating photon. Might other force carriers (such as the gluon, W and Z particles and graviton) also be formed by multiple interacting fields of types as yet unknown? How would you go about discovering such fields if they existed? Thanks