AR,

Apologies for falling off of the face of the earth there - Holidays. Ug.

LS is a good reference to get everybody talking about the same thing.

I agree with you that a particles angular momentum is defined by it's original energy and what happens to it after it's creation.

(For those in this forum who say that a particle has no "spin". That much is true. It expressed in angular momentum in a quantum state which is not like measuring rotation, but it is still a partial description of the particles energy and motion though it's quantum state, and defines how it relates to other quantum processes)

When the photon was created it would have an inherent angular momentum defined by the interaction that brought it forth. This would also define it's original energy state, frequency, wavelength, etc. I can invision a very rare occurance in which the photon in question colides just so with another photon. If the interaction fell within a very narrow corridor of possibility, the energy of the colliding photon could be absorbed by our original photon to increase it's net energy, and it's angular momentum. This would be similar to the excitation of photons in a laser, and this type of lasing has been seen in nature, although only in the atmospheres of gas giants, which maks the event too low in energy for our discussion. It would also be very much like a strong matter/antimatter interaction. The burst pulse you mentioned could still be used as a mechanism for increasing the particles energy as long as all of the energy in the burst was absorbed by the particle, and there were no other, lighter particles created as a result of the interaction. Very much like a particle/antiparticle interaction. A rare event indeed! This could certainly help to explain why this is not observed in the spectrum we float in today. The universe has cooled such that the energetic events required to create these situations are no longer present. Perhaps at some point shortly after the BB these particle interactions where faily common. Who knows what kind of things this would have done to the fabric of spacetime in an early epoch.
Thinking about it a little bit furter, there is a bit of this that seems like it would break the second law.... can't have that. Takers?


AR, I like your thought on the magnetic field causing opposite momentum in a particle. I will have to think about that one. It seems like there would be consequences in the quantum states if the particles where to share like that. Wouldn't the interger values have to be broken in order to get the spin to "reverse" in the second particle? Would the particle still maintain it's properties, or would it "decay" into something else?
I am a little puzzled as to how you seperate between the magnitism and the electromagnetic pulse of a particle. According to Maxwell, they are one in the same. Would they not have to both have an impact on the same process, ie the rotational force? What of QED in all of this? Would not the symmetry between the two forces have to remain unbroken? How then could you spin off an opposite momentum without breaking the conservation?
How have you combined that thought with your thoughts on the cubed nature of particles? I would be interested to hear about that.


z,

Okay this one you mentioned before about the blue shift bothers me a bit, and it could be because I am not getting what your driving at.
I understand the nature of blue shift. Here's the rub in your earlier post about being able to view a photon with a high blue shift, moving faster than light simply because we are moving toward the source. SR prohibits this. It can easily be explained that, even though you are moving toward a photon and in euclidian space you have to combine the velocities of both objects to get the sum of the velocities, when it comes to a SR frame of reference, those rules just don't apply the same way. Light waves can never be compressed enough to appear faster than c. And the frame of reference is completely observer dependant. Just because I may see what appears to be a photon moving FTL coming straight on, that does not mean that it is to any other observer. So, is it really moving FTL? I don't see how it can be. Am I misinterpreting what you were saying? I may simply not be understanding.

downunder,
I love the mental picture of a box 13 billion light years on a side! -and the wavelength that would constitute it's blackbdy radiation! Whew!!

Hi Otis,

All I am saying is that if the photon (gamma) source is moving towards you at high enough velocity, the photon energy you measure can be much greater than the normal photon energy {when the emitting source is at rest with respect to you)..

z

z,

That I get, physics is physics. What is put in has to come out somewhere. I guess I just have an issue with it, because it seems like a loop-hole in relativity that should not be there, even though in a certain way it makes sense that we would get that result.
Those kind of "outs" make me twitchy. Been bitten before....

Hi Otis,

From looking at it myself, it appears that the blue/red shift phenomena from a relativistic viewpoint are a consequence of the conservation of energy and momentum (or energy/momentum) and of time dilation.

z

Z,

Please explain to me a bit more how you see the time dilation effecting the doppler shift. I just want to see if we are thinking about the same thing, and I think we are, as it's pretty much basic wave physics.

One question though. How do you explain the fact that the observed energy of a photon moving toward you can be higher than the energy state for a photon moving at c in relativistic terms? The light speed limit also places a limit on the energy/mass of a particle. This seems to be a paradox.

Hi Otis,

Since the photon doesn't have any rest mass and always travels at the speed of light, the energy is only dependent on the frequency of the photon (E=hf)

I think the blue/red shift works like this. In the rest frame of the emitter the light has a certain frequency. In the frame of the observer this frequency is time dilated, since the emitter is moving with respect to the observer and the frequency is equal to 1/t. Add to this the necessary conservation of momentum conditions in the frame of the observer and you get the red/blue shift.

z

z,

Indeed. We are on the same page.

So lets talk about the higher limit of energy state in a photon. Heading towards the Plank energy. It would seem to me that the way the photon interacts with it's surrounding space, and even other particles, would change. The question is how? It also seems like a very unstable position for a photon to balance itself on, otherwise we would see these energy states in the photons that strike our detectors. Or is it just a flaw in our technology being able to detect such things?

If this is a silly string, please forgive me. I am sleeping on my feet.

Hi Otis,

It may be that the photon energy has to reach a certain level before any distortions in its interactions with fields or particles becomes apparent.

We may not have encountered photons of high enough energy to observe this phenomenon yet.

I believe that if this phenomenon were to be observed it would result from the interaction of the photonic field with the basic field matrix of space/time.

z

Hope you guys get back on this thread even though it has been fallow for some time...


Why would it be that we have not encountered photons in those high energy states?

I can see effects of the cooling energy states due to the expansion of the cosmos causing the lack of highly energized photons. However, there are plenty of high energy processes that would seem to provide enough punch for this to occur.

I have been thinking lately...is the lack of observations of particles with these energies have something to do with the structure of space itself? You seemed to touch on that above. It would make a great "energy sink". Might even account for some of this massive energy contained within the cosmological constant. Could even account for energy hidden in the Higgs fields, but that process gets messy at the beginning of the cosmos, shortly after the big bang.

Whadda think?

Hi,

The photons may have to reach an energy such that they will interact with certain very small structural and symmetry areas of the basic space/time field. These areas may be so small that the photon truly must approach the planck limit of its energy spectrum.

At energies lower than this but above gamma rays the interaction with the space/time matrix field may not result in enough distorion other than energy loss to be observed. In this case the energy loss would probably be attributed to some other phenomenon.

z

Well, if light is just "waves" in the "ether", then you could think of it like ripples on a pond. If they get too voilent (i.e. too high a frequency), they stop being nice curvy ripples, and they get all choppy. What would this look like in reality I wonder?

But then again, light is not a wave, nor a particle.. so perhaps the equations of each theory just can't tell you what would happen..

The answer can be found right here at this site, as the crazy kids out of the U. of Chicago and Duke found out about the state of lithium 6 when they observed superconductivity occurring at the couple billionths of degrees above absolute zero. The movement was one way going off into the great abyss.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the smallest wavelength have a period of 2 Plank times? And therefore a frequency of .5 cycles/Planck time? I think this because we assume that for every Planck time there is a change from crest to trough. If you could go through one cycle in one Planck time, it would make time continuous, which does not agree with the current theory. There is a change every Planck time, not within one. So your smallest wavelength would be 5x10^41 Hz. Anyone have any errors in my theory? Any other ideas? this is my first post, and i'm hoping that you guys would poke any holes in my theory, and therefore allow my to expand my knowledge. anyone wanna discuss this furthur, please email me.

Cam

Hi,
The photons may have to reach an energy such that they will interact with certain very small structural and symmetry areas of the basic space/time field. These areas may be so small that the photon truly must approach the planck limit of its energy spectrum.

At energies lower than this but above gamma rays the interaction with the space/time matrix field may not result in enough distorion other than energy loss to be observed. In this case the energy loss would probably be attributed to some other phenomenon.

Ooop! see next post

May I say this thread was an interesting read, errr~ , and here is my view.

Whilst reading most of this thread some concepts are slightly inaccurate, but I will let them slide.

I like to simplify things so here goes,

First let me address the infinity of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It is my hope most people agree light is a wave like phenomenon that is detectable by our sensors “eyes". How our sensors do this I will leave for later errr ~should one be interested.

Light can also be detected by other means. Man made instruments, and in fact these instruments can be far more proficient than our own senses. Duh~

Of course light is detected with our senses as colour and therefore it suggests differences, these differences have been defined as frequency by way of theoretical means errr~ yeah the Maths! But let’s not get into that, as it is well established and further more to the point where a certain frequency will immediately be interpreted to a colour.

Now the Question asked, - Starting this thread was “ what's at the end of the spectrum? ”

And in short the answer can only be that it is infinite, to go into the reasons one has to point out that even the reasons are dependent on the infinite reasons of why it jusy goes on!..

Now lets address how Blue/Red shift came about..

The colour spectrum consists of the lower end being the darkest colour our sensors Can detect,right up to the brightest frequency our eyes or sensors can detect, The dullest colour being red or a brown that is close to black whilst the hottest or energetic colour being blue, a blue that is almost white.

Ok can anyone guess what colour would be the coolest or of a lower frequency? You would be correct if you claimed towards the brown or red.

Ok lets move on and ask our selves what colour would we see if the frequency took a very short time to rise and fall to that of one that takes far longer, once again you would be correct if you claimed it would be toward the blue end of the spectrum whilst the slower rise and fall would be to the red end.

Now imagine what would happen if the object emiting yellow light began to move away from our eyes? You would be correct if you say that as the wave of light is emitted- the part of the wave behind the first part of the wave has to travel some distance to where the first part of the wave has been transmitted from, and in short the wave seems to have been stretched, this in turn lowers the percieved frequency, and the lower the frequency the closer to red or brown is percieved

Ok lets take a look at the implications of this and as we do one can quickly see the wave is indeed actually that of a lower freqency.. hmmm here we have an emission of light that is yellow and yet because the emission point moves away from us, - The actual wave that is detected by us and any other detector for that matter has a cycle that takes longer to cycle through, so therefore the light is explained as redshifted. Likewise if an object moves towards us the wave this time seems to be compressed or the cycle takes less time to cycle so therefore it is blueshifted..

Its pretty hard to explain with out diagrams and maths but yeah is it clear how red/blue shift happens?

There are other trivial points in this thread that should need correction, but hey its my first day here as a registered member and I don’t want to sound like a know it all!.. so before I forget, here is my disclaimer in that I declare that I know, I don’t know it all, and in fact my data may even be infected or corrupted.. no thanks to the many crackpot sites out there.

Cheers!..

I'm delighted to find this thread. The issues discussed have captured my interest and I've written some thoughts about the full spectrum, its limits and the strange things which probably occur at the highest energies.

Please note that EM radiation near the Planck limit is actually a couple orders smaller then the purported strings which (one theory has it) make up the underlying fabric of the universe.

Quantum physics and QED tells us that particles including photons have distributions in space-time representing the probabilities of these objects which are in fact related to their wavelengths. So the probability that a photon might appear on the other side of a totally internally reflecting surface is in fact related to the wavelength of the photon. When the probability becomes longer in time then the expected life of the universe we have a thing which is from a quantum analysis viewpoint not possible, this describes the latter case when we are more then a couple orders of wavelength away from the TIR surface. This is statistical but entirely reliable and our universe seems to be described properly this way.

So this means that similar behavior should apply to our meta rays (my name for EM much shorter in wavelength then gamma rays). Thus they will not necessarily interact with any normal matter being many many times smaller then the probability distribution of an electron. Unless of course QED does not work at these scales.

What is extraordinary is that there is a Singularity at the End of Our Rainbow and for a further discussion please go to http://www.attoscopy.com/meta-ray/meta-ray.html
where the discussion goes to the fact that such radiation leaves our universe entirely!