When you look out at the night sky and see stars, generally the photons from those stars are traversing great distances and times to hit the tiny 1cm opening in your eye. The difference between a hit and a miss is a few millimeters. Looking at this results in a paradox: for distant stars the angle between an hit and a miss photon approaches the Planck constant. One has to wonder how this manifests.
The study of physics has led scientists to believe that space that comprises the universe has a finite limit to continuity. You could view this as a grain or the largest distance differential where position remains unchanged in your frame of reference. If this concept was translated to a virtual reality it would be the fineness of the grid that the reality is built on. In virtual reality this block size is arbitrary but manifests obviously when the block size approaches the scale of the player.
However the relativistic universe is based on probability, so chances are Planck's constant doesn't relate to a grid but a landscape of probability with peaks and valleys corresponding to preferred and dis-favored positional states.
In real life the "grid" is so small compared to the scale at which we operate that it is relevant and difficult to even measure.
This may indeed manifest in looking at stellar distant photon emissions using a sensor like the human eye. An atom has a position and momentum that are interdependent in terms of certainty. It emits a photon that travels though space and then eventually strikes atoms in proteins in your retina (or not) and you see it. When that atom is astronomical distances from your eye the differential between a hit and miss approaches Planck's constant. This means that the probabilistic granularity of space may limit the possible trajectories the photon can take to reach the position of your eye. Some subset of photons emitted may simply not have a way to reach you because the granularity of space is manifesting. This effect would be proportional to distance and perhaps energy.
This could explain some of the "missing mass" of this universe, as mass of stars is estimated by output of energy, but some of that energy may be un-observable for objects astronomically distant.
Dear Glenn Soltes,
The emission of light is done by matter. The absorption of light is done by matter. Emission can only happen in units. Absorption only can happen in units. The unit amount of energy that is emitted or absorbed is called a photon. During the travel between emitter and absorber the electromagnetic wave can combine with many other waves to a wavefront. From this continuous wavefront the eye can extract a unit of energy to detect. That does not mean that all that energy was emitted as one single unit when it left the star. An electromagnetic wave can influence the stability of several light cells in the eye where the stored energy in them can add up to the needed level for detection. The eye is able to detect single amount of energy, a photon, its optics is at maximum quality for the aperture. It is an amazing sense that works to such perfection in a wet and warm environment.
Your assumption that the light has to stay as a hailstorm of photons with finite distance and thus with the chance to mis my eye seems, to me, not to cover reality.
Regards,
Paul Gradenwitz
I am not really specifying that assumption anywhere in the question ...
Dear Glenn Soltes,
Glenn> Looking at this results in a paradox: for distant stars the angle between an hit and a miss photon approaches the Planck constant. One has to wonder how this manifests.
I see in this that you assume that light on its path toward the eye consists of many photons. The star needs to send out photons in all directions and the angular difference as seen from the star between one edge of the pupil to the other edge of the pupil is clearly small. Let this angle go below the Planck constant. Then, according to this there should be gaps. When we have a large enough distance then we can say that a circle with that distance as radius would have a circumference 2πr and the minimum angle we could make would be 2πrh. When that is larger than our pupil then the probability would drop down that we see a photon. This would change the brightness equations that has a 1/r2 function .
Glenn> I am not really specifying that assumption anywhere in the question ..
I stay with my statement that you need that assumption to come to the question. I just showed you how I need to base the reasoning above on this assumption. You assume light to be photons all the way from emission till absorption.
Regards,
Paul Gradenwitz
I get it ..... the entity that we define as a photon is both a wave and a particle it is only our observation that forces it towards one extreme or the other......
If we pretended every photon was a pure wave then it would be visible in every direction at once much like a water wave hits every shore. This does indeed provide an answer to the paradox I posed. However light doesn't behave like a water wave and this is readily observable in devices such as a LASER.
So does the particulate nature of a photon manifest enough so that the probability of spacial limitations of Planck's constant are relevant? Can we test this?
Thanks Paul .... yours are the best thoughts yet ..... but I think something is still missing..... but maybe not ..... maybe the photon performs just for us ;)
Curious ..... can a photon be observed an arbitrary number of times like a water wave. Can the same photon be seen by me on earth and by another being on an imaginary planet on Vega. Is there some near infinitely small probability of this?
Can a photon even be thought of as an independent entity? Is it a singular or is it just a summation of probability.
Dear Glenn Soltes,
In your thoughts you still stay with the concept of a discrete entity that is called a photon. There is a clear unit of energy a quant that is emitted. This is the energy related to a photon. It seems that for one frequency of light that unit is always the same. Also when we talk about the absorption of light the same amount of energy is absorbed. Yet in the traveling of light we have a wave. That wave adds and subtracts with other waves. Here there is more a continuum. The unit of energy absorbed by the absorber is the photon unit but it can consist of parts of the energy emitted as several different photons. So think of a river. You are only allowed to add to the river in units of a bucket of water. You are only allowed to take from the river with unite of a bucket of water. Yet you never take from the river in your one bucket exactly the same water that was added to that river as one bucket. These bucket units are the photons. You can recognise them as long as they are outside of the river. Any experiment that is designed to see photons is outside the river.
Regards,
Paul Gradenwitz
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