Incredibly huge inconsistency of modern physics

I'm not sure that "curved path on a microscopic level" is the best layman-level translation of the QED photon behavior in material.

The way I'd put it is that, in vacuum, the thing that's moving through space and carrying energy is really just a photon. In a material, you do have a moving-energy-packet but it spends some of its time (more correctly: some of its amplitude) being a photon and some of its time being a coherent vibrational excitation of electrons and atoms. The "reason" the photon can move slowly in matter is that these excitations involve massive particles. That's why it's possible to "stop light"; in appropriately-prepared atoms, it's possible to arrange for that coherent-excitation-state to stand perfectly still.
 
Ziggurat said:
No, he's not mixing up reference frames, the issue is more subtle than that.

Take a reference frame (call it frame A) where a hunk of diamond is motionless. Send a photon through the diamond from left to right. As it passes through the diamond, its average velocity will be 0.4 c to the right.

Now switch to a reference frame (frame B) where the diamond is moving to the left at 0.4 c. The average velocity of that photon, while it's inside the diamond, will be 0 in reference frame B.

The trick is that "average" is not the same as "instantaneous".
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Thanks!
 
I see that my questions were not merely on the same level as this thread, they seem to have markedly improved it.
 
Ziggurat said:
No. According to QED, a photon traveling through a material with n>1 will take a curved path on the microscopic level. In a reference frame where the macroscopic velocity of light has been reduced to zero, what this essentially means is that the light is moving in a circle, but it's still moving, and still moving at c.



You have not discovered an invariant mass for individual photons. Rather, you have stumbled upon the existence of invariant mass for a system, as described by Darwin123 in post #126 above. The moving diamond acts like Darwin's hypothetical mirrored box. You cannot logically describe a property of the system as belonging to the photon alone.
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Another way to say that is the way a solid state physicist may say it.
As a solid state physicist, let me share this view.

Canonical photons don't move in the diamond. Canonical photons were absorbed by the diamond when they came in contact with the surface of the diamond. The propagating light will cause oscillation of other particles in the diamond. A quasi-particle emerged from the surface which we would a solid state physicist would call a polariton.

The polariton is not absorbed by the diamond as it propagates through the diamond. The polariton involves the motion of thousands of particles that were originally in the diamond plus the electromagnetic field. So it isn't a 'true photon which is traveling at 0.4c. It is the photon-polariton that is traveling at 0.4c.


Electromagnetic waves passing through a material couple with other forms of vibration. For example, an electromagnetic wave will couple with vibrational waves in a diamond. The resulting excitation is not a true 'fundamental particle'. It is a composite entity with a combination properties taken from each excitation. At certain resonant frequencies the pollution will act like both excitations. Far from resonance, most of the properties of the polariton will match one or the other excitation. However, the polariton can NEVER move at a speed of 'c'.

A light wave moving through a diamond will be a combination of phonon (atomic vibration) and photon (electromagnetic radiation). Thus, it would be polariton. At the frequency where electromagnetic radiation is visible (light), the polariton will have most of the properties of a photon. Hence it is called a photon-polariton. However, it is not a true photon.

Einstein and Lorentz used Maxwells equation with the vacuum parameters. Hence, the EM waves they analyze can't be polaritons. Einstein, Lorentz, and Poincare knew that 'light' travels slower in a material than in a vacuum. Their initial audience, consisting of physicists, knew it. They even knew some classical equations for characterizing the difference in speed of light. They knew that the light wave was changed by polarization, hence the name 'polariton'.

The speed of a polariton is less than the speed of light. Hence, the behavior of a polariton does not violate relativity. If the diamond center of mass is moving at 0.6c relative to an observer in the direction of polariton propagation (0.4c), the observer sees the polariton travel at 'V' where:
V=(0.6c+0.4c)/(1+(0.6c)(0.4c)/c^2)=(c/1.24)=0.80645c

I used the formula for relativistic addition of velocities. So according to this observer, the polariton is going less than the speed of light. Now, this is still a relativistic speed (0.80645c). However, the local speed of light in a vacuum was not exceeded. That should answer Wogagga's question. I hope that the moderators don't 'suppress him' before he responds !-)

Relativistic effects may change the way the polariton is observed for an observer moving with respect to the diamonds center of mass. Different observers will see a different velocity for the polariton. If a space ship does remote measurements on the diamond while passing by at 0.99c, then it may use the Lorentz transformation to figure out what an observer would see in the rest frame.

In the rest frame of the diamond, the speed of the photon-polariton is 0.4c. So you can say that the polariton has a rest speed of 0.4c, where the rest applies to the center of mass of the diamond. However, the actual velocity of the polariton is subjective. Only the local speed of light in a vacuum is objective.


Important question: Is there any way to stop the Google software from replacing polariton with pollution ?-)
 
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