Light as a wave or particle (split from A rational explanation for the dual slit experiment)

[bangstrom]

On 11/7/2021 at 1:28 PM, Ghideon said:

Because some of the properties of light and some interactions between light and matter can't be explained by treating light as a wave.

Can you give us some examples where interactions between light and matter can't be explained as a wave. The photoelectric effect has been discussed and the discrete nature of photon termination can also be explained as a wave without recourse to the simplistic analogy of particle impact. I don't find either of these as convincing evidence for the particle nature of light or am I missing something?

[swansont]

4 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Can you give us some examples where interactions between light and matter can't be explained as a wave. The photoelectric effect has been discussed and the discrete nature of photon termination can also be explained as a wave without recourse to the simplistic analogy of particle impact. I don't find either of these as convincing evidence for the particle nature of light or am I missing something?

You need to discuss this matter showing good faith: addressing the comments made to you and not "forgetting" past exchanges. Examples have been given to you, so let's not pretend that this has not come up before. It's not as much what you're missing as what you're conveniently ignoring. So let's not ignore things anymore.

You even admitted that light delivers its energy in a localized fashion, which is a particle behavior and not a wave behavior.

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/125968-delayed-choice-experiment-split-from-question-does-the-double-slit-experiment-prove-free-will/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-1189287

So I will reiterate my previous example: if light were a wave it would be able to share its energy among multiple atoms when interacting, because that's a wave property, as is losing just part of its energy. But it doesn't do that. The example I used was a 2 eV photon and a bunch of atoms with a transition at 1 eV.  We don't see the photon getting absorbed - no partial loss of energy, and it doesn't cause excitations in two atoms.

If you insist that light is a wave, all the time, and never shows particle behavior, how do you explain that it doesn't show wave behavior, and shows particle behavior in these instances? (and please note that "I'm not convinced" is not an explanation). You have proposed a model here, and you need to support it.

 

[Ghideon]

13 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Can you give us some examples where interactions between light and matter can't be explained as a wave.

The photo electric effect is one example. The experimental results disagree with classical electromagnetism. Continuous light waves, according to the classical electromagnetism, transfer energy to electrons, which would then be emitted when they accumulate enough energy. Study of the photoelectric effect led to important steps in understanding the quantum nature of light and electrons and influenced the formation of the concept of wave–particle duality.*

 

13 hours ago, bangstrom said:

The photoelectric effect has been discussed and the discrete nature of photon termination can also be explained as a wave without recourse to the simplistic analogy of particle impact. I don't find either of these as convincing evidence for the particle nature of light or am I missing something?

As far as I know Planck and Einstein got one Nobel prize each for their contributions regarding properties of light that the wave model failed correctly to predict. If you disagree with the mainstream science, Plank, Einstein and the Nobel committee's decision feel free to provide an alternative explanation.

 

*) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect and references from that page.

[bangstrom]

16 hours ago, swansont said:

ou even admitted that light delivers its energy in a localized fashion, which is a particle behavior and not a wave behavior.

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/125968-delayed-choice-experiment-split-from-question-does-the-double-slit-experiment-prove-free-will/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-1189287

So I will reiterate my previous example: if light were a wave it would be able to share its energy among multiple atoms when interacting, because that's a wave property, as is losing just part of its energy. But it doesn't do that. The example I used was a 2 eV photon and a bunch of atoms with a transition at 1 eV.  We don't see the photon getting absorbed - no partial loss of energy, and it doesn't cause excitations in two atoms.

If you insist that light is a wave, all the time, and never shows particle behavior, how do you explain that it doesn't show wave behavior, and shows particle behavior in these instances? (and please note that "I'm not convinced" is not an explanation). You have proposed a model here, and you need to support it.

I am not ignoring previous comments and I acknowledge that energy occurs as quanta and it is absorbed in discrete points but I find this feeble evidence to say that light is ever a particle. If photons exist as particles, there must be some evidence for their presence besides the two examples mentioned.

Light is quantized because it is emitted and absorbed in quanta determined by the energy levels of the electrons within atoms.

Light arrives at a single atom because light is a transverse wave and transverse waves don’t split, spread, or lose energy as you suggest. Separate transverse waves or scalar waves may diverge with distance but individual transverse waves remain intact. Localized energy is not a property unique to particles. I also find it convincing that a two-way wavelike connection is established between an atom at the source and an atom at the sink before a quantum of light energy can be transferred from one to the other so there is no such thing as a miss or a scatter.

If powerful laser beams cross, there is no photon scatter from collisions as would be expected if photons were particles. Even simple things like the Dirac three polarizer experiment are best explained by considering light to be a wave rather than a particle and there are recent quantum experiments that can’t be explained with light as a particle.

The Afshar experiment was an attempt to identify photons as particles and it failed to do so. The experiment was thoroughly dammed in peer review as error prone but Flores repeated the experiment with all the sources of error corrected and got exactly the same result- waves but no particles.

Light appears to act if it is prescient of its destination and Hugo Tetrode explained in 1922 how charged particles must establish a two-wave wavelike connection before they can exchange a quantum of light energy. This is not consistent with light as a random emission that wanders until it hits a target.

Wheeler and Feynman also came to the same conclusion about a two way connection with their overly complicated Absorber theory and the W-F theory evolved into John Cramer and Ruth Kastner’s present day Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and N.”Viv” Pope’s and Anthony Osborne’s Angular Momentum Synthesis. The latter pair were adamant about dropping the word “photon” from their writings so as not to confuse anyone with old images of the photon as a space traveling particle.

I see no reason or occasion to consider light as a particle and it appears to be an obstruction to understanding how light works. 

 

 

 

 

 

This two-way connection is central to contemporary theories of light such as the John Cramer and Ruth Kastner’s “Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” or the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis.

 

 

17 hours ago, swansont said:

You need to discuss this matter showing good faith: addressing the comments made to you and not "forgetting" past exchanges. Examples have been given to you, so let's not pretend that this has not come up before. It's not as much what you're missing as what you're conveniently ignoring. So let's not ignore things anymore.

As for some old business. I was told more than once that a one-slit diffraction pattern is not an interference pattern. This was stated as a matter of fact with no explanation except that it was impossible. I explained how it is possible and considered the matter concluded until I mentioned again that a one-slit diffraction pattern is an interference pattern. That was too much “not listening” and the thread was closed.

The problem is that anyone with a home-made slit and a laser pointer can get a perfectly good interference pattern from a single slit and I have done so many times as have many others so how can it be impossible?

I know where the idea comes from because the nearly unanimous consensus among physicists is that it is impossible because the broad band observed when light passes through a single slit does not show any of the fine bands of light and dark characteristic of an interference pattern. What gives?

For one thing, if your single slit is wide, like more than a wavelength light, and your detector is the side of the kitchen refrigerator, it is easy to see that the diffraction pattern lies of the same plane as where you would expect an interference pattern to fall. If you look beyond the end of the line in the center of the pattern you can see smaller bands of interference. There may only be two side bands visible, but if you make the slit narrower, the long band in the center becomes shorter and less apparent while the bands to the side move inward and become brighter. As the slit narrows, the diffraction looks more and more like an interference pattern. It becomes apparent that the bright band in the center is just one band of a typical looking interference pattern- which it is.

The physicists must be looking at just the long bright band in the center thinking it’s the whole diffraction pattern when it is only a single band of an interference and one would not expect to find interference bands within a single band.

Here is a quote from Sabina Hossenfelder and she explains this in detail. The bolded letters are mine.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/search?q=quantum+eraser+experiment

“The interesting thing about the double-slit experiment is that if you measure which slit the particles go through, the interference pattern disappears. Instead the particles behave like particles again and you get two blobs, one from each of the slits.

Well, actually you don’t. Though you’ve almost certainly seen that elsewhere. Just because you know which slit the wave-function goes through doesn’t mean it stops being a wave-function. It’s just no longer a wave-function going through two slits. It’s now a wave-function going through only one slit, so you get a one-slit diffraction pattern. What’s that? That’s also an interference pattern but a fuzzier one and indeed looks mostly like a blob. But a very blurry blob. And if you add the blobs from the two individual slits, they’ll overlap and still pretty much look like one blob. Not, as you see in many videos two cleanly separated ones.” Sabrina Hossenfelder Oct, 2021

If Hossenfelder calls the one-slit diffraction pattern an interference pattern, that’s good enough for me.

[SergUpstart]

On 11/10/2021 at 10:00 AM, bangstrom said:

Can you give us some examples where interactions between light and matter can't be explained as a wave. The photoelectric effect has been discussed and the discrete nature of photon termination can also be explained as a wave without recourse to the simplistic analogy of particle impact. I don't find either of these as convincing evidence for the particle nature of light or am I missing something?

The sensitivity of the human eye allows detecting a stream of 100 photons, but the frog's eye can detect even single photons. Therefore, if you move away from the glowing flashlight in the void and darkness, a person at some distance will stop seeing the flashlight. But the frog will always see the flashlight, but from a certain distance the light of the flashlight will blink and the frequency of blinking will decrease with increasing distance.

http://fian-inform.ru/priborostroenie/item/518-eye-frog

[swansont]

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I am not ignoring previous comments and I acknowledge that energy occurs as quanta and it is absorbed in discrete points but I find this feeble evidence to say that light is ever a particle. If photons exist as particles, there must be some evidence for their presence besides the two examples mentioned.

No, that’s crap. They either have particle behavior or they don’t. You said they never act as particles, and now you’re saying two examples aren’t enough.

 

 

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Light is quantized because it is emitted and absorbed in quanta determined by the energy levels of the electrons within atoms.

But that dodges the issue of why you can’t absorb part of a photon’s energy. IOW you’re addressing a different issue than in the example.

 

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Light arrives at a single atom because light is a transverse wave and transverse waves don’t split, spread, or lose energy as you suggest.

I’m suggest they cause excitations in atoms, and you’ve already admitted this happens.

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

 

Separate transverse waves or scalar waves may diverge with distance but individual transverse waves remain intact. Localized energy is not a property unique to particles. I also find it convincing that a two-way wavelike connection is established between an atom at the source and an atom at the sink before a quantum of light energy can be transferred from one to the other so there is no such thing as a miss or a scatter.

Light misses all the time.

 

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

If powerful laser beams cross, there is no photon scatter from collisions as would be expected if photons were particles. Even simple things like the Dirac three polarizer experiment are best explained by considering light to be a wave rather than a particle and there are recent quantum experiments that can’t be explained with light as a particle.

Photon-photon interactions occur, but this is only significant at high energy, but this misses the point. Nobody has claimed that all interactions reflect particle behavior. 

 

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

The Afshar experiment was an attempt to identify photons as particles and it failed to do so. The experiment was thoroughly dammed in peer review as error prone but Flores repeated the experiment with all the sources of error corrected and got exactly the same result- waves but no particles.

Afshar’s position is that particle behavior is observed, but I didn’t offer this experiment as evidence, and I only need one to rebut your claim, which (as I pointed out) you’ve already admitted is falso.

 

12 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Light appears to act if it is prescient of its destination and Hugo Tetrode explained in 1922 how charged particles must establish a two-wave wavelike connection before they can exchange a quantum of light energy. This is not consistent with light as a random emission that wanders until it hits a target.

This is a red herring. That’s not being claimed here. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Ghideon]

 

16 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I see no reason or occasion to consider light as a particle and it appears to be an obstruction to understanding how light works. 

Did you miss that in the linked article, and in your quote, Hossenfelder uses "particle" when appropriate? (And also "wave" when appropriate.) 

 

16 hours ago, bangstrom said:

If Hossenfelder calls the one-slit diffraction pattern an interference pattern, that’s good enough for me.

If Hossenfelder calls the photon a particle in those circumstances where light is best modelled as a particle, that’s good enough for me.

 

[bangstrom]

11 hours ago, swansont said:

No, that’s crap. They either have particle behavior or they don’t. You said they never act as particles, and now you’re saying two examples aren’t enough.

One good bit of evidence “a black swan” is all it takes to falsify a theory. The two experiments fail to give convincing evidence that light is a particle. The photoelectric effect is designed to detect light energy as quanta so it detects light as quanta. It does not necessarily follow that light quanta are necessarily particles or rule out the possibility that light is a wave or even that it occasionally becomes a particle.

I have a digital voltmeter that measures DC voltages in millivolt increments. That does not mean that DC voltages are quantized as millivolt particles.

Light energy may arrive as quanta and it may be quantized but that does not mean that light is also a little space traveling particle instantly picking up energy here and delivering it to an atom there all at a constant speed relative to a vacuum and at the same speed relative all inertial observers independent of their individual velocities. That sounds like a fairy tale.

11 hours ago, swansont said:

But that dodges the issue of why you can’t absorb part of a photon’s energy. IOW you’re addressing a different issue than in the example.

Light is only emitted in quanta to atoms that can absorb it in the same quanta and it requires two-way, wavelike connection between the signal source and the receiver before the energy transfer is possible. This is the “transaction” part of John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of QM.

"According to the assumption to be contemplated here, when a light ray is spreading from a point, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing spaces, but consists of a finite number of energy quanta that are localized in points in space, move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as a whole." Einstein 1905

11 hours ago, swansont said:

I’m suggest they cause excitations in atoms, and you’ve already admitted this happens.

Naturally, that’s what light is.

11 hours ago, swansont said:

Light misses all the time.

 

How do you know it misses?

“It is generally assumed that a radiating body emits light in every direction, quite regardless of whether there are near or distant objects which may ultimately absorb that light; in other words it radiates “into space.” ...

I am going to make the contrary assumption that an atom never emits light except to another atom.” Gilbert Lewis 1926

 

 

11 hours ago, swansont said:

Photon-photon interactions occur, but this is only significant at high energy, but this misses the point. Nobody has claimed that all interactions reflect particle behavior.

I am not aware that photon-photon interactions occur at any energy level and, obviously, not all interactions involve particles. But two photons colliding in space and scattering would reflect particle behavior.

Many have claimed that photon particles should collide and scatter when laser beams cross and the experiment has been repeated many times with negative results. The explanation was always that the particle populations were too low. The calculated photon populations are now within the achievable range but no one has yet observed a photon scatter.

12 hours ago, swansont said:

Afshar’s position is that particle behavior is observed, but I didn’t offer this experiment as evidence, and I only need one to rebut your claim, which (as I pointed out) you’ve already admitted is falso.

Afshar’s observation was that particle behavior was never observed in their experiments.

I said light energy occurs as quanta but those quanta are not particles in the sense that they are tiny ballistic particles traveling through space.

12 hours ago, swansont said:

On 11/10/2021 at 10:22 PM, bangstrom said:

Light appears to act if it is prescient of its destination and Hugo Tetrode explained in 1922 how charged particles must establish a two-wave wavelike connection before they can exchange a quantum of light energy. This is not consistent with light as a random emission that wanders until it hits a target.

This is a red herring. That’s not being claimed here. 

It may not be claimed here but that doesn’t make it wrong. It is claimed elsewhere.

“Initiating a (light energy) transition requires that signals propagate forward and backward in time, what Einstein called “ the character of reversibility.” Carver Mead 2000

Feynman and Wheeler came to the same conclusion when formulating their Absorber theory.

 

 

8 hours ago, Ghideon said:

Did you miss that in the linked article, and in your quote, Hossenfelder uses "particle" when appropriate? (And also "wave" when appropriate.) 

Unfortunately, I find it difficult to to explain light without the common practice of calling a single quantum of light energy a “photon.” We will never get the photon out of our language because it is so useful for explanations but I draw the line at calling a photon a particle. I define the photon to be a single quantum of energy in a EM exchange but not as a little bullet like particle traveling through space.

I find understanding light to be more comprehensible and rational without considering light to be a particle and we don’t need no “f” in fotons.

 

On 11/10/2021 at 2:33 PM, Ghideon said:

As far as I know Planck and Einstein got one Nobel prize each for their contributions regarding properties of light that the wave model failed correctly to predict. If you disagree with the mainstream science, Plank, Einstein and the Nobel committee's decision feel free to provide an alternative explanation.

Mainstream science moves on. As with most things, progress occurs at the frontier. Einstein later became agnostic about his photon particle theory.

"All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question "What are light quanta?" Nowadays every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken." Einstein in a letter to M. Besso, 1951

[swansont]

7 hours ago, bangstrom said:

One good bit of evidence “a black swan” is all it takes to falsify a theory. The two experiments fail to give convincing evidence that light is a particle. The photoelectric effect is designed to detect light energy as quanta so it detects light as quanta. It does not necessarily follow that light quanta are necessarily particles or rule out the possibility that light is a wave or even that it occasionally becomes a particle.

I have a digital voltmeter that measures DC voltages in millivolt increments. That does not mean that DC voltages are quantized as millivolt particles.

Light energy may arrive as quanta and it may be quantized but that does not mean that light is also a little space traveling particle instantly picking up energy here and delivering it to an atom there all at a constant speed relative to a vacuum and at the same speed relative all inertial observers independent of their individual velocities. That sounds like a fairy tale.

Light is only emitted in quanta to atoms that can absorb it in the same quanta and it requires two-way, wavelike connection between the signal source and the receiver before the energy transfer is possible. This is the “transaction” part of John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of QM.

"According to the assumption to be contemplated here, when a light ray is spreading from a point, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing spaces, but consists of a finite number of energy quanta that are localized in points in space, move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as a whole." Einstein 1905

Energy quanta that are localized in points in space. Is that a description of a wave?

 

7 hours ago, bangstrom said:

 How do you know it misses?

Because I can detect it after passing through a vapor cell, for instance. 

 

7 hours ago, bangstrom said:

 

I am not aware that photon-photon interactions occur at any energy level and, obviously, not all interactions involve particles. But two photons colliding in space and scattering would reflect particle behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_physics

“In pure vacuum, some weak scattering of light by light exists”

So I guess we’re done.

 

7 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Many have claimed that photon particles should collide and scatter when laser beams cross and the experiment has been repeated many times with negative results.

“many have claimed”? That’s weak. Who has claimed this? Where are the citations, so the specific claim can be examined?

 

 

[Markus Hanke]

20 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I am not aware that photon-photon interactions occur at any energy level and, obviously, not all interactions involve particles. But two photons colliding in space and scattering would reflect particle behavior.

They have been observed at the LHC in March 2019, with a statistical significance of ~8 sigma, which is way above the ‘discovery’ threshold:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/2667214

[Ghideon]

On 11/12/2021 at 5:55 AM, bangstrom said:

Mainstream science moves on.

Yes it does. That's one reason I prefer to use a particle model* when that model predicts how light behaves. You seem to move backwars; trying to use older models even when they fail to match observations . Why?   

 

*) And of course I would use a wave model when that is appropriate. And to explain for instance the phenomenon of spontaneous emission I would study quantum electrodynamics and fields rather than the earlier models.

[bangstrom]

On 11/12/2021 at 6:39 AM, swansont said:

Energy quanta that are localized in points in space. Is that a description of a wave?

It doesn't rule out the possibility.

On 11/12/2021 at 6:39 AM, swansont said:

Because I can detect it after passing through a vapor cell, for instance. 

I am not familiar with vapor cells, but if light can pass through a material,  its destination lies beyond that point.

On 11/12/2021 at 6:39 AM, swansont said:

“In pure vacuum, some weak scattering of light by light exists”

So I guess we’re done.

In QM anything that can happen eventually will happen even at lower levels than expected.  But is a photon-photon the source of the scatter? More in my next post.

 

On 11/12/2021 at 6:39 AM, swansont said:

“many have claimed”? That’s weak. Who has claimed this? Where are the citations, so the specific claim can be examined?

 

N. Pope is the only person I can recall who cited a specific series of experiments over time to detect photon-to-photon interactions but that is ancient history by now. I did a quick Google and came up with this from 2000 but the article is behind a pay wall.

Abstract: "We have searched for stimulated photon scattering in vacuum at a center of mass photon energy of 0.8 eV. The QED contribution to this process is equivalent to four wave mixing in vacuum. No evidence for scattering was observed."

Anyone can Google for examples but I think the consensus now is that the problem is not with photon populations but energy levels and lasers can’t deliver the required energy. They say we just need more power.

On 11/12/2021 at 7:20 PM, Markus Hanke said:

They have been observed at the LHC in March 2019, with a statistical significance of ~8 sigma, which is way above the ‘discovery’ threshold:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/2667214

I see no reason to question the CERN data, but mention “photons” and I am inclined to question the interpretation. If light is always a wave and never a particle and photon particles don’t exist, then there should be a wave explanation for the same experiment. I predict the experiment demonstrates the occurrence of a four particle annihilation as the source of the gamma-gamma emission. Not a direct photon photon collision.

 

Here are the preliminaries.

From a wave point of view, matter can only exchange energy with other bits of matter. The exchanges can take place locally by direct interaction or they can take place non-locally by means of entanglement. Entanglement involves a wave-like connection between particles prior to the the exchange of a quantum of energy. EM emissions, in this view, involve entanglement between a particle at the source and a particle at the sink.

Contrary to photon theory, energy can not exist separate from matter so energy can only be found in places where matter exists. Electrons are the usual stepping stones for a EM signal and the signal goes from en electron at point A to an electron at point B without passing through the the space between.

The apparent motion through space is the result of an excited electron in one atom dropping to a lower orbital just as an electron on the receiving end rises to a higher orbital. Energy vanishes from the electron in one atom and appears at another. The only motions are within the two atoms themselves.

Those are the basics. For a practical example, if an atom suddenly acquires a burst of energy as if out of nowhere, that energy must have come from most-likely an electron somewhere else. We can draw a wavy line to where we think that atom might be and that line should terminate at an electron source.

Back to the experiment.

I don’t know anything about the experimental setup at CERN but I can venture a genaric guess as to how it might work. They likely have a detector that suddenly registers a high energy hit. Next you can draw a wavy line back to what you think is the source. The most likely source is at the center of a vacuum where two high energy beams cross and there should be an electron at that point.

I don’t know how the electron got there but it is likely a virtual electron-positron pair that suddenly popped out of the vacuum. Virtual particles normally pop in and out of existence without effect, but if they appear in an a high energy environment they could gain enough energy to create a second electron- positron pair.

Two electrons and two positrons are an explosive mix and that is the source the gamma-gamma at the detector. No less than the annihilation of the four particles is likely to produce a gamma-gamma emission since the production from one pair needs another pair to act against so the setup is likely to have two detectors at opposite ends of the anticipated event.

The experiment demonstrates the presence of four particles in a high energy environment rather than a simple photon scatter. In order to demonstrate the presence of a photon it would be necessary to find a photon schlepping a bundle of energy at any of the empty spaces between two electrons.

I will leave it to you or anyone else to give us the correct explanation with photons.

 

 

[swansont]

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

It doesn't rule out the possibility.

I say it does (and this is what physics tells us), since you have a wave that has a characteristic size of its wavelength, and you apparently have no explanation or example of a localized wave to offer.

 

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I am not familiar with vapor cells, but if light can pass through a material,  its destination lies beyond that point.

Is that supposed to be an answer? If the light passes through a vapor cell it has not interacted. It has nothing to do with its destination. 

 

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

In QM anything that can happen eventually will happen even at lower levels than expected.  But is a photon-photon the source of the scatter? More in my next post.

 

N. Pope is the only person I can recall who cited a specific series of experiments over time to detect photon-to-photon interactions but that is ancient history by now. I did a quick Google and came up with this from 2000 but the article is behind a pay wall.

No link to the article, or a citation; the paper is also on ArXiv.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.0104.pdf

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Abstract: "We have searched for stimulated photon scattering in vacuum at a center of mass photon energy of 0.8 eV. The QED contribution to this process is equivalent to four wave mixing in vacuum. No evidence for scattering was observed."

And if you read further, you find that they didn't expect to find any evidence. 

Sometimes you do experiments where the expected result is small, on the off chance that you find something, showing the model to be wrong, and discovering new physics (I have been involved in such experiments, No, we didn't find any new physics.)

"This cross section is extremely small in the optical domain where high brightness sources exist"

Their results placed an upper limit of the cross-section, but that was still ~18 orders of magnitude larger than the QED prediction.

So this is NOT an example of "Many have claimed that photon particles should collide and scatter when laser beams cross" since they acknowledge the cross section is very small.

 

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Anyone can Google for examples but I think the consensus now is that the problem is not with photon populations but energy levels and lasers can’t deliver the required energy. They say we just need more power.

That's a dodge. "Anyone" didn't make the claim, you did. 

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I see no reason to question the CERN data, but mention “photons” and I am inclined to question the interpretation.

But of course you are.

 

2 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Contrary to photon theory, energy can not exist separate from matter so energy can only be found in places where matter exists.

Even if one subscribes to "it's a wave and only a wave" light has energy, light exists, and light is not matter. Unless you want to construct a whole bunch of new physics, which you haven't done, this doesn't wash.

[bangstrom]

2 hours ago, Ghideon said:

That's one reason I prefer to use a particle model* when that model predicts how light behaves.

I use the particle model often, too often- perhaps, because it is largely the only way to explain light as it is generally understood and thinking of light or even a wave traveling through space becomes a habit. 

2 hours ago, Ghideon said:

You seem to move backwars; trying to use older models even when they fail to match observations . Why?   

Photon theory is what I consider the "old theory" that overtook everything else in the 1920's. The Wheeler-Fynman Absorber theory had one foot in a modern way of thinking about light but the other foot in particle theory and the problem with particle physics is that anything can be explained by the invention of a new particle. Feynman had an infinite number of particles taking every possible path at all possible speeds including speeds in reverse and the theory was too absurd to survive but the W-F Absorber had one advantage over its predecessors in that it always worked.  

Others, most prominently, John Cramer  took the good parts of Absorber theory and got rid of the bad. Cramer defined the photon a a single quantum of energy rather than a space traveling particle and he had a theory that worked.

2 hours ago, Ghideon said:

*) And of course I would use a wave model when that is appropriate. And to explain for instance the phenomenon of spontaneous emission I would study quantum electrodynamics and fields rather than the earlier models.

I find that photon theory fails when to comes to explaining modern experiments in QM such as the double-slit quantum- eraser experiment or quantum teleportation. One experiment I find telling is an experiment where two entangled particles continue to communicate non-locally even though one of the particles has been annihilated. This is either some form of quantum necromancy or the entanglement is more likely to reside in the electrons rather than the photon middle man.

[studiot]

3 hours ago, Ghideon said:

Yes it does. That's one reason I prefer to use a particle model* when that model predicts how light behaves. You seem to move backwars; trying to use older models even when they fail to match observations . Why?   

 

*) And of course I would use a wave model when that is appropriate. And to explain for instance the phenomenon of spontaneous emission I would study quantum electrodynamics and fields rather than the earlier models.

An excellent. and satisfying short, summary of what everyone has been saying to you.  +1

Edited November 16, 2021 by studiot

[Phi for All]

On 11/11/2021 at 9:55 PM, bangstrom said:

Mainstream science moves on. As with most things, progress occurs at the frontier.

!

Moderator Note

But it's not happening HERE. Your discussion style is evasive and unhelpful when trying to explain your idea. You quote some responses but don't actually respond to them. You "venture guesses" and later use that to assert some other point. You write like this is a blog rather than a discussion, and your presentation style doesn't lend itself well to asking the questions you really need to be asking. 

You've been told this A LOT. You don't change, and seem to double down on your biggest mistakes. You wave your hands and dance around the gaps in this idea, and it's frustrating to the folks who are taking time to help. You need to address the issues that have been shown, and please do so like we're at a table talking, not like you're at a podium or trying to talk your way out of a speeding ticket.

 

[Ghideon]

9 hours ago, bangstrom said:

Photon theory is what I consider the "old theory" that overtook everything else in the 1920's.

Maxwell's electromagnetic wave equation: 1865.
Max Planck's solution to the black-body radiation problem: 1900
Einstein's explanation for the photoelectric effect, that light is composed of individual packets of energy called photons: 1905
Dirac using first-order perturbation theory to explain the phenomenon of spontaneous emission: 1927

 

11 hours ago, bangstrom said:

The apparent motion through space is the result of an excited electron in one atom dropping to a lower orbital just as an electron on the receiving end rises to a higher orbital. Energy vanishes from the electron in one atom and appears at another. The only motions are within the two atoms themselves.

(emphasis mine)
What does "just as" mean, for instance when transmitter and receiver are separated by some distance? Are you suggesting a replacement for relativity, information exchange at infinite velocity, something else?

 

https://archive.org/details/dynamicaltheoryo00maxw/ 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein-papers/1905_17_132-148.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory

[Markus Hanke]

11 hours ago, bangstrom said:

If light is always a wave and never a particle and photon particles don’t exist, then there should be a wave explanation for the same experiment.

Can you not see that you are going down a very slippery slope here? You are now starting with a conclusion (‘photons must be waves‘), and try to force available data to fit that predetermined solution.

This is the opposite of the scientific method.

11 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I will leave it to you or anyone else to give us the correct explanation with photons

The correct explanation is already given in the experiment which I linked - the rest of your post is just wild speculation that doesn’t even seem to be related to the specifics of the LHC setup, or even to any established particle physics.

To be honest, I think we’re done here.

[bangstrom]

18 minutes ago, Ghideon said:

What does "just as" mean, for instance when transmitter and receiver are separated by some distance? Are you suggesting a replacement for relativity, information exchange at infinite velocity, something else?

 

Just as means an instant exchange of quantum information and instant is not a speed. This is consistent with SR except for Einstein's 2nd postulate about the speed of light. The value of c in not a speed but a dimensional constant as it appears in Maxwell's equations where c=1/√μo ϵo. The permeability and permittivity of the vacuum limits our ability to observe events at a distance instantly. The NOW here is not the same as the NOW somewhere else. Our observation of distant events is always limited by separation of distance AND time at the constant ratio of one second for every 300,000 km of distance. This observation applies to all observers independent of their individual velocities because it is a constant ratio and not a speed. It is impossible to travel faster than c because c is a ratio and not a speed. Just as you can never travel faster than 1.6 kilometers per mile. 

3 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

Can you not see that you are going down a very slippery slope here? You are now starting with a conclusion (‘photons must be waves‘), and try to force available data to fit that predetermined solution.

This is the opposite of the scientific method.

The correct explanation is already given in the experiment which I linked - the rest of your post is just wild speculation that doesn’t even seem to be related to the specifics of the LHC setup, or even to any established particle physics.

To be honest, I think we’re done here.

Can you give a brief explanation of how the experiment works with particles rather than waves for comparison? 

[Markus Hanke]

3 minutes ago, bangstrom said:

Just as means an instant exchange of quantum information and instant is not a speed. This is consistent with SR except for Einstein's 2nd postulate about the speed of light. The value of c in not a speed

This is just getting bizarre now.

[bangstrom]

5 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

This is just getting bizarre now.

 

15 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

Can you not see that you are going down a very slippery slope here? You are now starting with a conclusion (‘photons must be waves‘), and try to force available data to fit that predetermined solution.

This is the opposite of the scientific method

This is looking at the same problem from more than a single point of view. The alternative starts with the conclusion that photons exist and they are particle like.

Just now, bangstrom said:

This is just getting bizarre now.

The article explains the results but the part I saw didn't explain the method. The conventional explanation involves the creation of virtual electron-positron particle pairs as I explained and these particles are the source the observed scatter. I explained how it works without the assumption that photons are involved. This is from wiki with the assumption that photons are the actors but whether or not photons are involved, the gamma gamma's observed can be traced directly back to a multi-particle origin.

 Photon to electron and positron.

 

For photons with high photon energy (MeV scale and higher), pair production is the dominant mode of photon interaction with matter. These interactions were first observed in Patrick Blackett's counter-controlled cloud chamber, leading to the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physics.

 

[Bufofrog]

46 minutes ago, bangstrom said:

This is looking at the same problem from more than a single point of view. The alternative starts with the conclusion that photons exist and they are particle like.

That is a misrepresentation of the situation, which I assume you realize.

[bangstrom]

1 minute ago, Bufofrog said:

That is a misrepresentation of the situation, which I assume you realize.

The results of the experiment are the same with either view. Only the interpretation of the results is different.

[bangstrom]

16 hours ago, swansont said:

I say it does (and this is what physics tells us), since you have a wave that has a characteristic size of its wavelength, and you apparently have no explanation or example of a localized wave to offer.

I claimed that light emitted from a point and arriving at a point does not necessarily imply that light is a particle at that point because light as a wave can do the same.

I answered your question before, Remember my repeated comments about transverse waves not spreading out and light no longer existing at its arrival so its point of arrival doesn’t imply that it ever was a particle? I have also answered similar questions but I don’t recall if they were from you or others and I responded by discussing the Afshar experiments, Poincaré's dot, the W-F absorber, and how light from one atom is only absorbed by a single atom. None of these demonstrate the particle nature of light.

Poincaré's dot is worth expanding upon since it speaks directly to your question. Poincaré claimed that a spherical object placed directly in a narrow beam of light should completely block the passage of light, if light is a particle, but if the object is only slightly larger than the beam, light should be able to pass around the obstruction as a wave. Afshar and Flores performed similar experiments with a wire grid.

Arago performed Poincaré's experiment using a metal bead on a string and he found that light went around the bead as a wave and landed as a bright dot exactly in the middle of the object’s shadow. So light as a wave can land as a point even if it has to curve around an obstruction. That is an example of light as a wave being emitted from a point and landing at a point.

Light responds to its environment beyond what one could expect of light as a particle. Diffraction is one example. If light passes through a single slit it produces a diffraction pattern, If it passes through a double slit it produces an interference pattern, and if it passes through a triple slit, it produces an even more elaborate pattern. How does a photon passing through only one of a triple slit “know” how many slits are to its left or right and act accordingly?

If a photon of light reflects from the surface of a frosted glass plate, it reflects a random angles. But if it reflects from a polished surface, it reflects at its angle of incidence. How can a single particle “know” if the area around it is rough or polished?

Light responds to the wave like nature of its surroundings, and if those conditions favor arrival at a single point, it will arrive at a single point. That may be particle like behavior but it does not rule out the total wave like nature of light.

 

 

[exchemist]

4 hours ago, bangstrom said:

I claimed that light emitted from a point and arriving at a point does not necessarily imply that light is a particle at that point because light as a wave can do the same.

I answered your question before, Remember my repeated comments about transverse waves not spreading out and light no longer existing at its arrival so its point of arrival doesn’t imply that it ever was a particle? I have also answered similar questions but I don’t recall if they were from you or others and I responded by discussing the Afshar experiments, Poincaré's dot, the W-F absorber, and how light from one atom is only absorbed by a single atom. None of these demonstrate the particle nature of light.

Poincaré's dot is worth expanding upon since it speaks directly to your question. Poincaré claimed that a spherical object placed directly in a narrow beam of light should completely block the passage of light, if light is a particle, but if the object is only slightly larger than the beam, light should be able to pass around the obstruction as a wave. Afshar and Flores performed similar experiments with a wire grid.

Arago performed Poincaré's experiment using a metal bead on a string and he found that light went around the bead as a wave and landed as a bright dot exactly in the middle of the object’s shadow. So light as a wave can land as a point even if it has to curve around an obstruction. That is an example of light as a wave being emitted from a point and landing at a point.

Light responds to its environment beyond what one could expect of light as a particle. Diffraction is one example. If light passes through a single slit it produces a diffraction pattern, If it passes through a double slit it produces an interference pattern, and if it passes through a triple slit, it produces an even more elaborate pattern. How does a photon passing through only one of a triple slit “know” how many slits are to its left or right and act accordingly?

If a photon of light reflects from the surface of a frosted glass plate, it reflects a random angles. But if it reflects from a polished surface, it reflects at its angle of incidence. How can a single particle “know” if the area around it is rough or polished?

Light responds to the wave like nature of its surroundings, and if those conditions favor arrival at a single point, it will arrive at a single point. That may be particle like behavior but it does not rule out the total wave like nature of light.

 

 

This is a Gish Gallop. There is a whole series of points and assertions here that are not connected.

If you were serious about your ideas you would pick one point at a time, and follow it through rigorously in all its implications. By hurling a series of different ideas, all at once, you make it impossible to respond properly. Gish used to do this deliberately, as a rhetorical technique to make his opponents appear unable to reply coherently and thus score a "victory" in the eyes of uninformed listeners. What is the point in trying to do that here on a science forum?

I will pick one easy point to respond to. A photon, or a "light ray" if you want to be classical about it, is reflected from a frosted glass surface according to the angle at which it strikes a particular point on the surface. Since the surface is not flat, that angle depends on exactly where on the surface it strikes. This explanation does not depend on whether one assumes a wave or a corpuscular model for light.

I suggest you stop flailing around and focus on the photo-electric effect alone, since that is regarded as the definitive evidence for the quantisation of light. And don't get hung up on the word "particle". Light is shown to be quantised. Nobody argues it behaves like a little steel ball.