On 06 Sep 2004 23:51:53 GMT, (HAVRILIAK) wrote:

TO: Guy Macon
Thank you very much for your comments. I've tried your suggestion to prove the
point. Instead of flipping a coin I did the following calculation. If you
flip an unbiased coin 2 million times it will come up heads 1 million times and
tails 1 million times. Thus there will be 1 million moves in the positive
direction and 1 million moves in the negative direction. Since the moves are
commutative, i.e. a+b=b+a, the net result is no shift. Now if we bias the coin,
there will be a drift in one direction or another depending on the bias.
There was a recent comment made that the bias is sort of site dependent (my
words not his)
In the case of polymer chain statistics, the bias comes from unequall
energy states or you cant go where you came from.

In the Sun, there are complicating factors (for instance, in parts of the Sun
where the mean path of a photon is very short, convection can become the
dominant process for transporting energy). Still, the "bias" in the random walk
of a photon in the Sun has little to do with any physical processes (as in your
polymer example) and everything to do with the statistical nature of a random
walk. In three dimensions, there is a near unity chance of the photon reaching
_any_ point inside the Sun given enough steps. Of course, once it gets close to
the outside, it escapes. In the case of the Sun, the time to do that is a few
tens of thousands of years, depending on the variant theory describing it.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com