"Henri Wilson" HW@.... wrote in message
...
On 6 May 2007 10:28:13 -0700, George Dishman
wrote:


"Henri Wilson" HW@.... wrote in message

Yes it does, that is basic probability theory.

Probability is not a cause of anything. It's a result.

Nobody said anything about probability being causal.

George, like many others, you are completely misinterpreting the role of
statistics, which is a science dealing with the outcome of multiple
events.

Henry, I'm not talking about statistics, I'm talking
about probability. There is a subtle distinction.

there is.

Mathematics, on the other hand, is designed to analyse or predict single
events.

Maybe you should study probability a bit before
trying to discuss it.

I have already studied it George.

Then get out your notes and do some revision, I
don't intend to waste my time explaining it to you.

You can say that BEFORE the bullet is fired...because the conditions
that
cause
the bullet to land where it does are random.
However, that does not alter the fact that each bullet hits where it
does
for
specific physical reasons that are theoretically capable of being
mathematically analysed and explained.

Whether or not true randomicity exists is a big question.

No, it's not a question at all, it is proven beyond
any doubt.

You are jumping in too early again George.

No, this was proven decades ago.

It IS a big question that includes things like 'free will' if human action
is
involved..

Indeed, without true randomness as an intrinsic property
'free will' could not exist, and with randomness it is
seen to be nothing more than noise in the system. Leave
the philosophers and religiously minded to deal with that.

If I fire a bullet that misses the target, PROBABILITY says, 'that's OK,
it is
a statistical fact that no matter how good the shooter, occasionally one
WILL
miss'.
However, I say, it missed simply because I didn't aim in the right
direction.

dx.dp = h_bar/2

....
Nobody has demonstrated that true randomicty exists, at any level.

Sorry Henry, your decades out of date again.

No. even at the atomic level, this has never been completely resolved.

For instance, consider radioactive decay.
We know all about its exponential rate. ..but we don't know why each event
occurs exactly when it does.

What we know is that if it is exactly exponential, then
every decay event is independent of all others and occurs
with no cause.

Is there a unique physical explanation for each
one. Likewise, we don't know why emitted particles move in the directions
they
do even though the angular distibution is statistical predictable.

We know dx.dp = h_bar/2

Yes. A grating deflects an individual photon depending on
the colour of that beam, not the rate at which photons
arrive. I'm thinking of say a dim red laser with a flux
of a few photons per minute. Like the coin tosses, each
one is deflected purely on its intrinsic properties.

If all the photons are identical, should they all be deflected by the
same
amount?

To within the intrinsic uncertainty of the energy property.
That means there is a fundamental lower limit to line width.
You can think of that either as the (gaussian) spectrum of
the line showing the power in each frequency that you get
from a Fourier transform of the received sine wave or as a
histogram of the photon energies (which will produce a small
spread of deflection angles) or by transforming to the time
domain as the phase jitter on the RF sine wave. They are all
just different coneptual models of the same feature.

If E=h.nu there is no distribution at all.

dt.dE = h_bar/2

If you measure with some certainty when a photon arrives,
you increase the spread of the energy. That is one reason
why a monochromatic laser line cannot have zero width.

I would like to think that the diffraction angle depends on the actual
phase of
the photon's INTRINSIC oscillation when it strikes the grating..

Frequency (or equivalently wavelength), not phase.

In the case of monochromatic light, the theory says energy is relfected
equally
at all angles but is reinforced only at one angle. Destructive
interference
occurs at all other angles thus nullifying energy transfer at those
angles.

Yes but it is the frequency that determines the angle, not
the phase.

Try to explain THAT with the particle model George. How actually do photon
'particles' cancel each other out?

Read QED Henry, that is exactly what it does.

Yes. When it hits a grating each photon deflects depending
only on its own properties and not the properties of other
photons that arrive some seconds earlier or later.

yes. That would have to be right.

Excellent. That is a major agreement Henry.

not really...

What? Didn't you just agree? "yes. That would have
to be right." sounds like an agreement to me.

Consider microwaves hitting a wire grid.
Each photon in the wave is deflected by an angle that depends
only on its own properties independent of any others.

But there is also a second diffraction based on the microwave
'wavelength'.

Same thing.

No it isn't. If you modulate a laser beam with a 100000hz signal, you get
two
entirely different diffraction patterns.

Suppose the unmodulated light has a frequency of fc.
If you fire the modulated light at a grating There
are two obvious possibilities, either you get a line
with time varying intensity at an angle corresponding
to fc, or you get a signal which has a carrier fc and
two sidebands at +/- fm

fc
|
fc-fm | fc+fm
______|____|____|______

and each frequency produces a line of constant intensity.
Either way, you don't get any power at the angle
corresponding to fm itself.

My understanding is that the stream contains a mixture
of three frequencies of photons and if you have the
resolving power in the grating, you get three lines
but a lower resolution will cause the lines to overlap
and the interference then causes the time varying
intensity.

Sorry George, I cannot imagine a single photon that is maybe 1
lightsecond in
length and expands as a radio signal diverges. Do you think it expands
forever?

Photons are particles Henry. Look at the example I gave
of the sodium doublet. The line width has to be less than
6A while the mean wavelength is 5893A. The Zeeman effect
produces individual lines with far smaller spacing. A line
of 5893A wavelength and width of 0.003A must contain more
than 1.7 million cycles so would be more than 1 light
second long in a classical wave model, yet it is absorbed
instantly by a single electron in the photo-electric effect.

You have never seen zeeman lines from ONE transition.
there are always millions involved.

For the sodium doublet, I believe there are just four
for one line and two for the other.

....
I believe the sagnac effect is due to an entirely different
factor...such
as a
local EM frame that behaves like an aether.

I don't care what you belive, it is a fact that the measued
speed is independent of the speed of the source.

Nobody has ever measured OWLS at all George, let alone from a moving
source.

Still in denial Henry? Nothing you say will be treated
with anything but contempt as long as you are unable to
face reality. Sagnac does precisely that.

Come on George, you don't have any kind of model for a photon. You think
it's just a couple of sinewaves drawn at right angles on paper.

No, I think it is a fundamental particle like an electron
which has the property of carrying energy (and others).

'the property of carrying energy'
That doesn't really tell us much does it George...hardly a model...

Of course not, the model is the equations of QED. I'm
only giving you a hand-waving overview.

I think when the charge is taken to some destination, the car
also arrives at the same place. You can't send the car to
Boston and have the charge arrive in Cairo which is what you
are suggesting. Beyond that discussions of their length are
irrelevant, the length has no analog in the photon.

How do you know.

Because your suggestion is equivalent to saying the heat
produced by friction in an ocean wave can be deposited
inland.

George, you know how water waves can be diffracted, for instance by a
row
of vertical bars.

Yes, and the energy of the waves is then carried in
another direction to be deposited where the waves go.

If photon are particles that are reflected over 360 degrees from each
line, how
do you explain all that destructive interference over the 359.9 degrees.

A grating has to have a spacing that gives a sensible
deflection Henry or it becomes a mirror. That's why
chicken wire can be used as an RF reflector.

Do you really believe that the water molecules that go up and down near
the
bars are the ones that end up making the diffraction pattern maybe 100
metres
away?

No Henry, exactly my point. That is what you are telling
me, that the grating angle for the wave is not the same
as that for the photons composing the wave.

Your theory has to rely 100% on the wave model of light to expain
gratings.

No, "my theory" is QED which is purely a particle theory.

..and then it fails.

.... and it works perfectly, it is one of the most accurate
theories in the whole of science.

My model of photons as independent vibrating quanta
explains it all.

Rubbish, it can't even explain the photo-electric effect.

Henry, I think we have maybe got a handle on this, in
your grating equation if you have red laser light
arriving at a level of one photon per second, would you
use the frequency of the red light or the 1Hz rate of
one photon per second to work out the deflection angle.
I say it is that of the light regardless of the arrival
rate, you are telling me the wave energy goes to one
place at an angle determined by the 1Hz figure while
the photons themselves go to the location given by the
red light frequency.

the should be another very weak energy build up where the 1 hz is
diffracted.
How about modifying your experiment to make the 1 Hz sinusoidal.

How about you calculate how much energy BaTh says is in
this extra mode you have invented. For a fairly bright
source with random arrival times (e.g. a sodium lamp
where the photons are emitted thermally) there should
be a background continuum under the lines. Make your
prediction of that level and then research the literature.

I'm too busy...how about YOU do it.

Easy, zero, each photon is independent.

The concept matches the data very well.

It makes no sense though, how can the energy go anywhere
other than where the photons go?

Strange things happen.

Perhaps, but for your bizarre idea to 'match the data
very well' requires _all_ the energy to go where the
1Hz deflection predicts and none to go with the photons.
As I said, it makes no sense.

How do you explain destructive interference with the particle model
George?

Look up "sum over histories".

George