Ronald Hyde

If you meant hypothetical it's still not possible. You can't set up a hypothetical situation where you have a massive body and accelerate it to the speed of light. Not and be consistent with Special Relativity. If you suspend SR the speed of light is either undefined or infinite, which makes the hypothetical situation meaningless. So you see how the question really has no answer.

JMJones0424 gave a very good description of this, but FYI the Feynman book is written so that anyone who understands Algebra can comprehend it. As far as Quantum mechanics is concerned, it's a bunch of more or less arbitrary seeming rules for calculating what can happen in a physical situation. Even Feynman has said that, he may have even said it in the book. So your finding it mysterious and opaque isn't that surprising, so does everyone else. But it does work in every case, and everything that suggests that it's wrong, when tested, proves to be false. So it's how the World really works.

This isn't the same as my version of gravity. Mine invokes a potential that goes as [math]1-MG/C^2r[/math], where M is the gravitating mass, G is Newtons constant, C is the speed of light and r is the radial distance from the gravitating mass.

It's not only impossible practically, it's impossible theoretically too. If it were possible theoretically, it would be possible practically too. Otherwise the validity of a physical theory would be meaningless.

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on." This verse by the mathematician and logician Augustus de Morgan makes light of the fallacy of trying to see the world as being made up of 'things that are made up of other things'. A sort of Victorian version of Monty Pythons "The society for putting things on top of other things'. From Galileos time to the present all that experimentalists have been able to do is make measurements of experiments and report them. And all theorists have been able to do is find mathematical relations among the results and build mathematical representations of them. The fact that some of those relationships involve countable and conserved objects doesn't imply that we should view them as 'fundamental', since the objects have proved to be little changelings they themselves contradict that notion. The rules for constructing the representations might be considered as being 'fundamental', but not the representations themselves, aka 'particles'.

While this is a very simple question to ask, and the answer is a resounding 'yes', people should not think that it is a trivial question, or that the answer is unimportant. Because it is true for all of space, throughout all of time, and independent of the method of measuring C, it is a general law of Nature. It provides many ways for deducing important consequences in the World. The fact that C can always be set equal to 1 means that space and time can be expressed in the same units, and retain those units forever.

All experimentalists can do is measure what happens during an experiment, and report their results. All theorists can do is build mathematical representations that connect those measurements. That is all there is to Physics, measurements that are related to each other, and mathematical representations of them. To postulate spurious entities like Aether to 'explain' the result is both unneeded and dangerous, because it fools people into believing that they can understand the World as being made up of some kinds of 'things', when there are only mathematical relationships. The sooner people stop believing that the World is made of 'things that are made up of other things' the better Physics will be.

I don't really regard causality as being some required principle of Nature. It may well be that some processes that occur now may have 'causes' that lie in the future, but since we have no knowledge of the future till we get 'then', we can't know at the time it happens. Consider that in the simple case of the Photon there is an 'advanced' ( forward in time ) part, and a 'retarded' ( backward in time ) part. We as observers only receive information from the past, but the atom that emitted the Photon may have received some from the future. But in principal we have no way of determining what information it may have received.

I think the standard model has been substantiated enough that it will basically stand. It obviously needs to be improved by deriving some of the 'free parameters' in some way, and being a mathematical theory there may be other ways of representing it, mathematics allows many ways of representing equations and such. A long time ago, maybe thirty years ago, after reading an article in Analog science fiction magazine named 'Dimensions Anyone?', written by a medical doctor, I concluded that our system of units should use length, time, quantum mechanical phase and plane angle and discard mass, and modify any quantities that contained mass. I'm quite sure that other people have reached the same conclusion.

You've got my interest because I have some similar ideas.

All the classical quantities in your description have a quantum mechanical counterpart. The frequency of the individual photons, and therefore the energy of each one, is that of the wave. The phase of each photon is represented by it's position, in time and place, in the wave. Because they travel at C the phase doesn't change. The number of photons transmitted per second is the power of the wave divided by the energy of each photon. The EMF is the potential that is associated with the antenna input, and for the wave you divide that by the distance from the antenna to get the signal strength, which is also EMF. The impedance of the vacuum is 377 ohms, which is just 4piC in rationalized units. The impedance of a dipole antenna is about 75 ohms.

Special Relativity really concerns itself with the depiction of events which occur in space and time, and it's true that objects which are moving relative to an observer appear distorted, but to an observer which is not moving relative to the object, there is no distortion. This is well known and accounted for in the equations. So there really isn't any problem with the idea that different observers may see something as having a different length at different speeds or directions. It's just that we can derive all of these facts from Einsteins two premises, we don't need to add any extra ones to get things right.

What you're probably looking for is a lamp that will make the materials you're talking about 'fluoresce' as opposed to merely reflecting the light. The material fluoresces and reflects at much lower energy than that required to make fluorescence occur, because it's a two step process. The molecule absorbs the UV energy, drops down to a lower lever, then drops down again to the ground level by emitting the rest of the energy.

I don't think we should forget the roles that innovation and scale play in the economics and efficiency of chemical processes. A single innovation, reverse osmosis for example, can completely reform a process, boiler feed water treatment in this case, and other processes too. The manufacture of lead/acid batteries was similarly changed by the discovery of polypropylene. But scale too, something which works poorly on a small scale may work much better on a large scale, and vice versa.

Einstein showed that only two premises were required to deduce all the consequences of Relativity. What is the point of introducing unneeded added premises?

Pyrolysis can be combined with Hydrogenation to produce perfectly good fuels with lower oxygen content. The Germans used Hydrogenation during WW2 to supply themselves with gasoline after their supplies were cut of by the Allies. They used lignite coal as their 'biomass', which is similar to lignin. We may need to resort to those methods in time, but as long as it is not economic that won't happen. Also you can Hydrogenate tar sands to get more and better fuel out with less pollution. One big problem is disposal of the waste, which may be highly toxic, and for instance, contain heavy metals or other toxins like Arsenic or Selenium.

Only in the case of an electromagnet do the free electrons play the only part. In the case of magnetic materials such as the Iron core of an electromagnet, or a permanent magnet things are much more complicated and involve some Quantum Mechanics.

Obviously we have different points of view. You seem to want to convert me to yours, after all yours is 'right' and any other is wrong. Sounds more like religion to me. I understand about the Ammonia molecule. I understand all those things that you did or did not say. I understand what your friend said about molecular configurations too, which is also relevant. All of Nature is a process, from our space-time point of view. Everything that is a part of Nature is a process running within the larger process. People, benzene molecules, stars, galaxies, you name it. This is the view that will eventually prevail. Think of the notion of process that is used in computer science, that is a better analogy than most. Nature is a mathematical-logical contruct. All the laws of Nature that have ever really worked are mathematical laws. There are no wheels and gears, no little balls circling around other little balls, there are only mathematical representations, the less we try to interpret them as little 'things' the better off we are. That's my reply to whatever question you asked.

This is a very good question to ask, and it shows a lot of insight on your part to ask it. No, the electrons are in the 'conduction band' of the metal of the antenna, so they can take on a nearly continuous spectrum of momentum and energy states. When a time varying voltage ( potential ) is applied to the antenna terminals the electrons make transitions between those states. During some of those transitions they can emit photons of the frequency ( energy ) of the voltage variation. Because there are so many photons of such low energy ( frequency ) we can safely represent them as a continuous wave satisfying Maxwells wave equations. This radio antenna antenna analogy turns out to be a very good way to represent important aspects of the notion of a wavefunction. This post is very worthy of reply. Your statement that mine is a strange point of view is entirely correct. You see, I view the world as being entirely mathematical in its form, I do not entertain a 'dynamical' view of the world, and I haven't since I was a teenager reading about the behavior of an electron in a cathode ray tube. I concluded then and there that all we knew about the electron were things that could be expressed mathematically and the notion of the electron was only to be understood in such a context. So to me physics is entirely about building mathematical representations of Nature, the electron is one such, the wavefunction is another. But we have to understand the significance of each representation, and place it in its proper context. So I'll study more about the 'collapse of the wavefunction', but from what I've seen so far it supports my own view that it represents the best information that we have about a system, and how that information evolves with time through the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian representations, but is not to be taken too literally. BTW, I learned something really important from you, and it applies to the subject here. You said on another post that the Ammonia molecule time varying representations were 'physical', and that has a strange implication in itself. It implies that any system whatever must be the superposition of at least two base states. The sole exception to that in all of Nature would be the Higgs particle which is a true 'one state system'. But maybe that should be discussed in another post.

Actually silicon is used as an insulator in some capacitors, just small ones used at radio frequencies. They're called 'varactors' because as a reverse voltage is applied to the 'plates' the depletion of the junction causes a decrease in capacitance. If you have an FM walkie-talkie set it may use them to modulate the frequency.

I see space as being in two parts, one is the coordinate system we use to describe positions, which by the rules of SR, we must include with time, and the other is the 'vacuum' which is part of space that has no matter in it. The vacuum has properties, where the coordinate system is only an 'index' of where stuff is located.

Here's two examples: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63628-wave-function-collapse-takes-some-time/page__p__654800__hl__collapse__fromsearch__1#entry654800 http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/65712-measurement-immediately-after-wave-function-collapse/page__p__671373__hl__collapse__fromsearch__1#entry671373 But they're really all over the web. There's hardly a forum you can go to that someone isn't discussing or hasn't discussed 'collapse of the wavefunction' or the related 'Schrodingers cat problem'. A radio receiver tunes into different wave lengths.I am not sure that I understand what you mean when you say" the wave function doesn't represent a concrete thing in nature". Actually that's an excellent picture to draw from. The radio transmitter antenna continually creates the wavefunction, and the receiver antenna continually 'collapses' part of it. The collapsed part represents photons that have produced currents and moved changes in the antenna, which have in turn induced changing voltages in the receiver input circuits, which are amplified and detected to convert them to audio frequency signals, then amplified more to go to the headphones.

We're all discussing the physical significance of the concept of the wavefunction. And you have ( for whatever reason ) revived the topic so we can continue it.

What really puzzles me is why someone would get upset that I wanted to describe something in a way that was different than they asked for. There might have been a reason for that, like the fact that this model of the World is all about numbers, and the possible relations among numbers, and the building of mathematical representations of what happens in Nature, and that is the context in which it is all to be understood in, and not bob, jane, ted or alice. And this post has had nearly 600 reads, so it may well be that others have taken some of the ideas and run with them. Many people have stated the postulate and <1> in some way or another, others, including Werner Heisenberg, have floated <2>, my only real addition is <3>, which is crucial as it removes the random element and makes the world a completely logical structure.

This is helpful. These last two posts have greatly clarified the situation in my own mind. In the question in #35 substitute the word 'configuration' for 'state' and it will be correctly phrased. That is the question I seek the answer for. I will modify the OP in due course. I can see I really should have payed the syntax on this one. I thank you all for being ( sort of ) patient with me. I know what I want, but not always the words to put it in.