A crazy idea about inertial motion

I thought this was a mechanical problem. A signal could be used to prevent collisions, but a collision is itself a signal, of a very direct impulsive sort, yes?

I was comparing your question about vehicular chain reactions to the speed of sound in a solid (non-perfectly rigid) body. This is a good analog of a chain of cars speeding up and slowing down in near bumper-to-bumper traffic. K would be related to reaction time. The density would be related to how heavy the traffic was.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound

For the speed of sound to be infinite in a solid, the density of the body would need to be infinite, which apart from being very difficult to move, is an impossibility for any solid matter composed of atoms.

 

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You seem to have an issue with the speed of waves Dan, which is not the case here since the principle I am talking about should work indifferently for cars or for atoms. Nobody asked yet what kind of signal the atoms would be sharing for them to know about the speed at which they would be supposed to accelerate: what about doppler effect? Would doppler effect produce the steps that I am talking about if the cars could measure it? And if they could, wouldn't the atoms be able to do the same providing that they could measure it too?

 

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What makes you say that energy is exchanged between two atoms bound together as a molecule, in order to maintain their link?

A chemical bond is due to the electrostatic attraction between nuclei and the electron cloud in the various molecular orbitals. What energy exchange are you referring to?

 

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An admission that you're trolling should be enough to get you and your "crazy idea" into the Cesspool.

 

Hi Exchemist,

Its like for gravitation, unless you consider that electrostatic attraction only curves space, there has to be an interaction between nuclei and electrons, and this interaction must not be instantaneous otherwise the law of causality would be broken. For gravity, the interaction is supposed to be held by gravitons, and for atoms, it is supposed to be held by virtual photons. The photons that we observe all come from quantized steps of massive particles, so we can consider that virtual photons are quantized too. We use the light from these steps to measure motion from a distance, what I suggest is that the particles might use that principle for themselves, what would allow them to produce the motion that we observe. For atoms to be able to measure doppler effect, the only property they need is to keep time accurately so that they can produce their photons at the same frequency, and the atomic clocks prove that they can.

This said, if we want to dig the question out a bit, you must tell me if you think that doppler effect could produce the steps between the two cars, because if everybody agrees with that, it means that it could also produce them between two atoms.

 

Suggest you read the thread I started about "virtual photons", in the Physics and maths section. They are not "photons" at all really, just disturbances in the field that are for convenience treated like photons in the mathematics of QFT.

There is no exchange of energy required to explain the attraction that holds together atoms in a molecule.

And while it is true to say photons are emitted when massive particles in bound states change energy level, this is due to the quantization of their states they can occupy, due to the way they are bound. A massive particle that is in a free state is not quantized and can emit or absorb any amount of energy it likes - as shown by the continuum in atomic spectra.

 

Isn't exchange of electrons exchange of energy?

Here is wiki about continuous spectra:
"In particular, the position and momentum of a free particle have a continuous spectrum, but when the particle is confined to a limited space their spectra become discrete."

It seems to me that a molecule is a confined space, not to you?

 

We're not talking about exchange of electrons, are we? I thought you were talking about so-called "virtual photons".

Yes, the quotation you make from Wiki is what I've been saying. The behaviour of a free (unconfined) particle is NOT quantized. It is the depth and shape of the confining potential of a particle that determines the quantization, i.e. what values of energy and other properties it is allowed to have.

The atoms in a molecule are confined, sure, and their energy levels are quantized, but no photons are emitted or absorbed unless they change from one allowed energy state to another. When such changes occur, we see bands in the spectrum, characteristic of the molecule. But if no change is occurring, no photons - nor energy - are "exchanged". The idea that, in, say, the ground state of a molecule there some kind of constant energy exchange going on between the atoms is not part of physics.

 

Yes we were talking of virtual photons, but they come from the exchange of electrons.

When it arose, one of the problems with quantum theory was to explain why electrons were not radiating when on a ground state, and the answer was that they could not get on a lower state, and that they would emit light only when getting back from a higher state to a lower state. This means that, when they are part of a molecule, if one of them starts emitting a photon directly to the other, it should induce a higher state electron, which would get back to a lower state while emitting the same photon towards the other atom, back and forth indefinitely. The question is then: could that kind of interaction not emit light outside the molecules? And my answer is: if an electron is able to completely absorb a photon from outside its system, why would it not be able to do so for a photon inside the system, thus when linking two atoms of a same molecule?

 

No. The atoms in a molecule are most strongly bound together when the molecule is in its ground state. When the molecule is in this "ground" state, it means the electrons have no way of emitting a photon at all. This is because, to do so, one of them would need to drop down to a level below the ground state, in order to release the energy needed to create the photon. But it can't, because, er, it is in the ground state. That's what ground state means. Ground. Bottom. Lowest. Rez de chaussée. So there is no point in hypothesising some kind of internal emission between the atoms. None of the electrons has enough energy to emit anything.

In any case, the electrons in a molecule no longer occupy atomic orbitals. The shape of the potential well experienced by the bonding electrons, due to the two nuclei at either end of a chemical bond, is such that new, molecular orbitals are formed instead, in which the electrons are shared between the atoms. They no longer belong to one atom or the other. The energy levels are again quantized, due to the confining potential, but the levels are different from those in the atoms, because the potential is different.

The theory of chemical bonding is a great and fundamental topic in science.

 

OK, so the electrons that bind atoms do not interact together and they do not interact with the nuclei. When a molecule encounters another one, the electrons from the two molecules do not interact and do not repel each other, so they cannot help the nuclei to move as we observe them to do. Then what tells the molecules to move away when hitting each other in a gas? How is the direction and the speed of the molecules transmitted to the atoms?

 

Are you being deliberately stupid? Of course they interact. Electrostatically. They just don't send each other energy, which is what you have been claiming.

 

Sorry, I felt a bit ironic yesterday.

OK, electrons interact electrostatically when two molecules get close to one another, and they interact the same with the nuclei. Now, when two molecules hit in a gas, how will the information from the change in speed and direction of the molecules be transmitted to the nuclei? Will it be transmitted instantly? And if not, how could it not produce the steps that I am talking about?

As soon as an electron is pushed toward the nuclei, it loses its ground state, so it will resist the change while trying to get back to it, but if the push is strong enough, it wont be able to do so for a while. During this time, an electrostatic information will be transmitted to the closest nucleus that an electron is accelerating toward it, and while resisting to that change, it will also be forced to accelerate away from the electron, thus from the other molecule, but if the force is strong enough, it will start moving, and transmit backwards this information to the electron that has still not recovered its ground state.

To simplify the understanding of the mechanism, lets admit that the push on the electron stops exactly when the information from the nucleus gets back to it. Once the push has stopped, the electron starts to stop moving ahead, but it does not have the time to stop that the information from the nucleus starts coming in. At first, this information is about the previous energy level, but at the end, the nucleus being a massive body, it has been accelerated too far from the electron to respect that level, so the electron is first forced to stop moving ahead while trying to get backward, and then forced to accelerate toward the nucleus again to follow it in its deceleration.

Meanwhile, that information is transmitted to the other nucleus the same way, which should produce the same delay between the accelerated motions, thus the same steps, that would justify their inertial motion if the transmission of information is perfect. It is much easier to analyze those delays while using doppler effect between the nuclei and neglecting the electrons in the process. This way, a nucleus stops moving when doppler effect is null, and accelerates when it is not: it does not have to keep going because it is massive and it resists a change when it is being accelerated from outside of the system because doppler effect immediately manifests itself.

 

Sorry, the last phrase should be written this way:

"it does not have to keep going to justify its mass, and it resists a change when it is being accelerated from outside of the system because doppler effect immediately manifests itself."

 

When a molecule approaches another molecule, its electrostatic charge modifies the potential confining the electrons, raising the ground state in energy as the molecule is distorted from its normal shape. The molecule then moves in space so as to allow the ground state to return to that undisturbed state. But the electrons stay in the ground state throughout, unless you hit them bloody hard. It is possible, at very high temperatures, to create excited molecular electronic states, but generally you will only excite rotational and vibrational motion in the molecule. So can we please forget this about electrons leaving the ground state?

 

it's called an octet rule.
also look into orbital diagrams,electron configuration and sublevel blocks,ionization energy, die pole- die pole , electronegativity,polar/nonpolar and symmetry.
then learn what a gamma emitter is

 

You are right, the electrons do not have to step out of their bandwidth to be accelerated a little, and this is not what I meant either. When the ground state is raised in energy, as you say, it changes the shape of the link, but it takes time for this information to get to the nuclei, what would cause the steps that I am talking about. I like this idea because it changes the regard we have on motion and because it explains resistance to change from the same principle.

 

http://www.sciforums.com/threads/a-crazy-idea-about-inertial-motion.142745/page-2#post-3234179

 

just ignore the typical ignoramus.
it's obvious that they are uninformed about anything they are spewing.

 

Well, one can dream. But if I had my druthers, I would dream of always being right, not always being wrong.

I am late seeing this, and didn't bother to read the rest of the posts. But I can give you an answer which I think probably defeats every argument you may have raised so far.

It's not correct to say that energy is quantized. Energy is proportional to frequency, and it makes no sense to say that frequency is quantized. Further, velocity goes as the square root of a value proportional to kinetic energy, therefore it's incorrect to say velocity is quantized.

What is the end game to this argument? That it proves the existence of God, or that you are yourself some sort of god? I don't get it.