• Hachem
    384
    I found this image somewhere on the web, and it symbolizes for me all that I do not understand in modern science. And by understanding I mean in fact the inability to accept, even if can follow the explanations given.

    I consider this image as an ontological puzzle because it explains the transition from one form to the other as a photon. The simplest explanation that I can come up with in my blessed ignorance is that something created or caused that photon to appear and went on further its merry way.

    Apparently that is too simple. We are told to believe that that something (electron + positron), got completely annihilated and turned into a photon (light?), to then rise again from is ashes like a magical phoenix , and take its original form once again (electron + positron).

    I am sure others will be delighted to explain to me how such a magical happening is the most rational event one can conceive.

    I will be listening very carefully.

    ameg80ku1eub6wep.jpg
  • Hachem
    384
    I should say instead of "it explains the transition from one form to the other as a photon."
    "it explains the transition from one form to the same form as a photon.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Is there anything to this thread other than your incredulity?
  • Hachem
    384
    My desire to understand?
  • VagabondSpectre
    1.9k
    I am sure others will be delighted to explain to me how such a magical happening is the most rational event one can conceive.Hachem

    Asking why the world isn't like your own personal imagination of how things should rationally be is backwards if you're trying to explore science.

    Start by asking why your imagination of what is rational is different than the way things actually are, not why you might be mysteriously right from the apriori get-go. The world is the way the world is regardless of how you want or believe or imagine it is or ought to be.

    Like your wailings regarding light, I could kick up an intuitive fuss about existence itself and say: "How is it 'rational' that something should exist rather than nothing? Physicists will have to explain their magical assumption that something exists or else admit that their theories of existence are unfounded"

    Do you see the problem with the above Hachem? It's painfully obvious that things exist, just like it's painfully obvious that the contemporary and scientific models describing light mechanics reflect reality. We know our theories are quite accurate because of all the accurate predictions and technological applications we can create out of them (the science works in ways that go unfathomably far beyond your own crude attempts to describe light, making them superior in every conceivable way).

    Electrons generate photons; they just do, and it's a brute observed fact of the world we live in. An electron can emit a photon if it loses energy (where the photon will have a total energy equal to the energy lost by the electron). We don't know the "why" of photon generation, we just observe that it happens (like existence itself) and try to understand the "what" of it.

    You will surely find this unsatisfying, and this does get into the more speculative and hypothetical end of our physical models, but one answer to particle creation/annihilation AND the existence of something from nothing is the idea that for every particle that gets created of X energy, an anti particle of -X energy is simultaneously created. Why do electrons create photons? Because they have to; it's the way they are. If they wern't that way, we wouldn't be around to ask these questions; it's what's required for things to exist in this plain...

    Why is it we live in a world where the laws of energy conservation are unbreakable? At what point of ad nauseam demonstration that you cannot break energy conservation laws will you accept that this is the case? Consider, for instance, your concept of how light fills a surrounding dark space and how objects are viewed at a distance. Do you realize that the farther away we get from the light source that the less and less light energy actually strikes us (light gets more diffused; if it didn't then the laws of energy conservation would be broken and we could create free energy/perpetual motion machines).

    Physics isn't about sitting around, hypothesizing how we think things are or should be, and arguing from intuition why we're correct. Physics is about surrendering to evidence. Quantum mechanics was never appealing to anyone (except maybe Heisenberg, but nobody can say why) and it's filled with utterly uninuitive and borderline stupid sounding nonsense that makes most people (especially physicists) recoil in disgust at just how ludicrous and unintuitive it sounds. AND YET THEY ACCEPT IT DUE TO THE OVERWHELMING PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE. If you want to understand quantum mechanics, you've got to create new intuitive models, new visualizations, and you've got to forget about all the unproven physical assumptions you have previously operated on.

    The field of quantum physics is indeed on the hunt for a new and revolutionary way of understanding, describing, and otherwise conceptualizing the behavior of quantum material, but it's got to actually be better than the "place-holder" observation based descriptions which are currently the best we can do. We don't fully understand electrons and we definitely don't understand why electrons behave in the way that we definitively observe them behaving, but we have experimental evidence to demonstrate that those behaviors are descriptively and predictively accurate.

    Nothing you've suggested or offered provides insight or predictive power into the why of physics, and most of what you've suggested has long been scientifically falsified (that light transmission is instantaneous for example).

    So... If you want to provide a replacement model, it must actually explain the results of the experiments we conduct and offer us greater predictive power over them rather than in fact being falsified by the results and offering no insight or predictive power whatsoever.

    Asking questions about your lack of understanding is one thing, but framing it like an open challenge to refute the supposedly robust bushel of semi-decipherable nonsense you beat around and allude is the way things are, is another thing entirely. The moment you begin accusing people who are earnestly trying to explain the science (that you so evidently don't fully understand) as being intellectually dishonest (or whatever), it comes off like the most naively arrogant, pretentious, and exhausting thing we can imagine: here is someone asking random slews of questions with complex answers who then shits on everyone who cannot satisfy him with an answer while actually assuming that he knows more than every PhD holding physicist on the planet (even while he claims not to).

    Don't be that guy Hachem. Start by educating yourself as formally as you can. Here is a series of lectures called "physics for future presidents" which covers pretty much all of the topics you have questions about. It will give you reasonable access to accurate enough conceptual tools to understand light, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics as portrayed by the contemporary scientific consensus. Please watch it:

    https://cosmolearning.org/video-lectures/atoms-heat/

    The above link will start you on the first lecture. Watch them all. I would recommend this series of lectures for any would be philosopher actually.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    Enrol in a physics course.
  • Hachem
    384

    you mean you don't know the answer?
  • A Seagull
    615
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/download/777/elec%20posi%20photon..jpg

    The diagram looks incorrect to me as it does not follow the law of conservation of charge.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    I've tried in two of your mad threads to set you straight. That'll do.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    How? 1-1 = 0 = 1-1.
  • A Seagull
    615

    The arrows indicate the direction through time.

    1 + 1 does not equal -1 + -1
  • Banno
    25.3k
    Read it left to right. Time is indicated by the vector along the bottom of the diagram.
  • Hachem
    384


    It looks much like image formation: one side is the inverse image of the other.
  • A Seagull
    615

    Then the first electron is travelling backwards in time. The diagram still doesn't make sense.
  • Hachem
    384

    How would a correct diagram look like according to you?
  • Forgottenticket
    215
    OP, you're not the poster dukkha are you?
  • Hachem
    384
    OP, you're not the poster dukkha are you?JupiterJess

    I don't know what that means.
  • Forgottenticket
    215
    I don't know what that means.Hachem

    Sorry, it was another poster who made a thread about light and reflection, but looking back over their thread they were more into the cognitive aspect whereas you're challenging the physics of it.
  • fishfry
    3.4k
    Nice. I wish I could afford one like this.Hachem

    That was Feynman's van. Wasn't sure if everyone knows that.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    The arrows you are looking at show The flow of charge, not of time. Time moves from left to right.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    13.2k

    Who published that diagram? The English is not good. It says "a electron", then "an new electron".
  • Hachem
    384

    it's on a need to know basis. And we don't need to know. :)
  • Banno
    25.3k
    So suppose you come across something you don’t understand, written by a bunch of physicists.

    Here is a sensible approach. Do lots of reading and study and see if you can work out what it is that they are talking about.

    Here is another sensible approach. Trust the people who have done lots of reading and study and seem to know what they are talking about.

    Here is a silly approach. Ask lots of questions about what you see in front of you, as if the physicists had obviously got it all wrong.
  • Hachem
    384

    Ha @Banno, you are really endearing in your naiveté. It is not a matter of understanding, but a matter of being convinced. I hope you will not give up your efforts in explaining to me how you think the diagram, however you interpret it, depicts a rational theory.
  • fishfry
    3.4k


    Have you looked at this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram

    That would be the starting point for this discussion.

    One para of interest:

    Feynman used Ernst Stueckelberg's interpretation of the positron as if it were an electron moving backward in time. Thus, antiparticles are represented as moving backward along the time axis in Feynman diagrams.

    You can't expect to look at a formalism and have it be obvious. People (including @Seagull) should study this Wiki page as a starting point for beginning to understand what this is about. You can't just go, oh 1 + 1 isn't 1 - 1 as if you have a Ph.D. in quantum physics but you don't even know how to read the diagram.
  • Banno
    25.3k
    I’m not attempting to explain it to you. You are not available for learning.
  • Baden
    16.4k
    (Moved to "Questions" category. This is not Philosophy of Science, it is confusion about science.)
  • Banno
    25.3k
    Shame that @Hachem chose to ignore your post.
  • VagabondSpectre
    1.9k
    I'm actually holding out hope that he's watching the lecture series I linked him to...

    It's like at the end of Good Will Hunting XD!
  • Banno
    25.3k
    Perhaps; even if he hasn't thank for the post - I now have the lectures on my list...
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.