Two Distinct Vertical (V) or Horizontal (H) states of light?

[geistkiesel]

R Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" describes light as being made up of 1/2 "horizontal (H) " and 1/2 "verticle (V)" modes. God, therefore, according to Feynman, made two distinct modes of light - or the two modes were born in the egalitariuan Big Bang which produced exactly 1/2 V and 1/2 H modes of light.

Feynman might make light like as he described, but methinks the "other side of the story" is a tad different,

The dual light mode is used to conform with polarization experiments primarily, but I haven't seen a lot of discussion on this issue in the literature.

Therefore, I will offer a correction here. Light has one mode, only one. That mode is oscillatory where H and V alternate in time at some natural frequency. Whether the light "particle" will be H or V is determined on which mode was "observable" when the light became polarized. The time history looks like this:

VHVHVHVHVHV...VHVHVH

where a V implies a 'not H' and where 'not H' is simply a nonlocal parameter which appears and returns to nonlocal status, after a brief appearance of 'observable', at some characteristic frequency -- ditto re V..


Would Ma Nature make two modes of light from two separate light generators, or would one mode with an oscillatory function seem more conforming to the infinitely sharp edge of Occam's razor?

try it you'll like it!

Geistkiesel :shrug:

[James R]

How does your model explain the observed cos-squared behaviour of polarisers?

[AlphaNumeric]

Naviely the photon has 4 polarisation directions, because it exists withi a 4 dimensional space-time, a space-like oscillation, a null oscillation and two transverse ones. However, due to particular technical things, two of these are removed, the null and the space-like. This leaves the photon with two polarisation directions, both of which are orthogonal to its direction of motion (hence the name 'transverse'), as shown here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Light-wave.svg).

This arises in a totally natural and elegant manner (it can and is generalised to 10 dimensional string theory and leads to the reason string theory is a quantum theory of gravity!) so Occams razor doesn't say that the photon has one polarisation. Besides, the physical implications of two polarisation modes are heavily tested.

QED, the quantum theory of light, has been around for more than 50 years and is tested a great deal. If the photon had only one polarisation mode, QED would have been disproved long ago.