Why are the 'Fixed Stars' so FIXED?

On 25 Sep, 22:36, HW@....(Dr. Henri Wilson) wrote:
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:47:38 -0700, George Dishman wrote:
On 23 Sep, 21:15, HW@....(Dr. Henri Wilson) wrote:
On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:16:11 +0100, "George Dishman" wrote:
"Henri Wilson" HW@.... wrote in message ...

...but I cannot see how a gamma paticle can end up similarly dispersed....

Photons hit one atom on a detector but never that
next to it. They usually behave like bursts of
wavefronts in optical systems and zero-size
particles in detectors.

That is not an acceptible theory.

It is not a theory of any kind Henry. A theory
consists of a set of eqations that make
quanititative predictions of observed measurable
values.

What I said is a statement of what is observed,
any valid theory has to predict that behaviour.

George, admit it. Nobody including you has much of a clue about the true nature
of light.

You obviously don't, QED is a complete theory
of light and gives arguably the most accurate
predictions of any physical theory.

Well you can't produce an interference pattern that way.

But they do Henry, a lot of astronomy is done that
way now. Take your EM program, think of it like
a string of umberellas and if one red umberella
wavefront passing through one telescope arrives at
the same time as another later red umberella
wavefront via the other telescope then you get
constructive interference. You have drawn the
pattern along a 1D 'ray' and the wavefronts are
normal to that but imagine what a 3D view would
look like. Who's to say how wide it could be?
The evidence is they cover the whole sphere at
emission.

Well I say the conclusions are a complete misinterpretation of the facts.

What I have written above are the facts, it is
up to you to interpret them. Photons only ever
cause a single detection in a sensor (perhaps
multiple electrons if avalanche technology is
used) and individual photons are subject to
all the normalrules of interference and
diffraction.

To get interference from two detectors spaced 100 metres apart requires
coherence. If a single photon stretches right across then what you said above
is wrong. A 100 m wide photon will strike more than one atom.
Even YOU should see that.

Of course. A simple telescope mirror has to
have the whole surface accurate to a fraction
of a wavelength because it all affects each
photon, but the photon only ever interacts
with _one_ atom when it finally hits the CCD
or photoelectric plate in a PM tube. You claim
to be familiar with the photoelectric effect
so you should know that already. The same is
true in the VLTI configuration, each photon
is affected by the paths through both
telescopes and all of both their surfaces, but
the detector still sees them as individual
particles. Those are the facts, what you have
to do is invent a theory (a set of equations)
that predicts that and the resulting interference
pattern.

You also said once before that the interference is cause byinteraction
between photons emitted from the two sides of the star.

No Henry, you said that. I said that was impossible
because they are uncorrelated. I think you spend
too much time inventing strawmen and forget what I
really said.

George, if the pattern is NOT caused by photons from both sides of the star,
how can it possibly privide information about radius change?

I explained that before. Photons(idividually) from
one side of the star create a pattern of intensity.
Photons from the other also create their own pattern,
again behaving individually, but the patterns are
displaced by a small amount, essentially the size
of the "image" formed by the telescope. Because one
is shifted relative to the other, the nulls don't
occur in the same place which affects the contrast
ratio of the fringe pattern. The actual analysis is
much more complex, involving limb darkening and lots
of other stuff but those are the basics.

It sounds as though all you are seeing is a fuzzy image of the star.

There are different ways to configure the detection.
In 2D mode what you get is an image crossed by
interference fringes. In 1D mode you get a graph
which looks like a static version of your EM
illustration, a windowed sine wave.

No Henry, you get interference when a single photon
is received at both ends of the antenna and combined.
If the path length difference is a multiple of the
wavelength you get constructive interference as usual.
That applies to each photon individually. The path
length difference for the phtotn includes a term that
depends on which side it came from since that slightly
changes the angle of the wavefront since it is
perpendicular to the line of site.

George, no matter how you try to wriggle out, a single photon from a star
cannot tell you anything about the star's radius.

Of course not, as I told you before, it is the
superposition of the displaced interference
patterns that carries the information....

I could just as easily carry information about varying light speed.

Don';t change the subject, it is the pattern that
provides the information as I ahve told you before,
not a single photon which is your strawman.

I don't accept that cepheids are really huff puff stars.

Tough, the radius is observed to vary and the
interferometric, photometric and integrated
velocity measurements are all similar.

.they are willusions.

Not according to ballistic theory, it says
they are valid.

I hope you are impressed George.

No, ballistic theory is wrong as shown by Sagnac
but I am pleased that you have learnt a little
local astrophysics, that's what this game is all
about ;-)

Sagnac disproves SR. ...

Don't waste your time with stupid word games, it would
be better spent if you learned some schoolboy calculus.

I know more about calculus than you do.

ROFL, you just tried to tell me equation [3]
should be (c+v)/n, obviously you cannot even
differentiate an exponential :-)

I prefer to avoid it where possible.

Hardly surprising given your incompetence, but
then that's physics anyway and all you want to
do is talk philosophy.

George