Are photons energy? What is energy, anyway?

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What does "keep" the plates apart then, in your corner of the universe? Do you think it's the charge itself, the "stuff" that flowed into the electroscope?

 

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What the hell are you asking me that for?? Isn't that what I said just a few posts ago? You say I'm trolling here . . . what the fuck are you doing then?

 

Ah, I see. There's a force keeping the plates apart. Where does this force come from, does it do any work moving these plates apart?

 

Don't avoid my question: does the SE need to formulate proton frequencies, or their energy eigenvalues? Are electron orbitals only explained by a system with two oscillators in it, i.e. a pair of coupled oscillators?

Or not? Please don't assume I don't know the answer, this time, and answer the fucking question.

 

Right now I'm waiting for some kind of answer to my direct question to you, which I think goes to the whole "what is a photon" thing. So please, let's hear about the 2-particle eqn for electron orbitals in elemental hydrogen.

 

Neddy, my answer would be that your question to James and myself has no valid answer, because there is no such thing as "pure energy", any more than there is such a thing as pure momentum, or pure velocity - or pure length!

What James, Origin and I have all maintained throughout is that energy is an attribute, not an entity. You cannot have a "pure" property existing on its own, fairly obviously.

 

EXACTLY!

I begin to suspect Arfa has some sort of mild cognitive impairment. Several times in this thread he has quoted sources that say something different from what he maintains they are saying.

 

This about Schrödinger's equation is tangentially interesting, in a way.

As most people who have experience of trying to solve problems in physics will know, one of the most powerful ways to analyse a physical system is by means of considering its energy. This is what Schrödinger did, in effect, using the Hamiltonian formulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamiltonian_mechanics

The power of this approach is that the eigenfunctions of his equation contain within them all the other information about the system, not just the energy. Just as solving a problem in classical mechanics by recourse to energy allows one to deduce, subsequently, all manner of other results about the system.
Applying the appropriate operator to these eigenfunctions yields values for all observable properties of the system.

The fact the eigenfunctions are derived from considering energy obviously does not mean they ARE energy, in some silly way, any more than a classical mechanical system IS energy. Considering energy is, like considering entropy or momentum, a method of problem solving.

 

I don’t understand how you guys are defining energy. I find it really easy to understand like this.

Energy = motion or Kinetic Energy

Work = a change of motion or Kinetic Energy

Potential Energy = Potential Kinetic Energy

All physical forms of energy are fundamentally KE.

End of story…

?

 

Apart from being off-topic, this is not a very useful way of looking at energy. There is no reason to think any one form of energy is more fundamental than another.

In fact energy is commonly defined as "the ability to do work", which has the weakness of suggesting work is somehow more fundamental than other forms. But work has at least the benefit of being easily recognised and measured, whereas various forms of internal energy, (heat energy, chemical energy), potential energy, or even kinetic energy, can only be inferred indirectly from other measurements or by calculation.

 

How can it be off topic when the tread title is "Are photons energy? What is energy, anyway?"

There is only one form of energy... KE

The work is caused by another object/mass transferring KE or momentum to the object/mass being worked.

Both forms of KE,
heat energy = motion or oscillation of molecules/atoms.
chemical energy = motion of particles or systems being moved by field interactions.

 

Total ballocks.

 

Ok, so electric fields 101 includes the lesson that a pair of objects which can hold or store some electric charge interact; in a simple metal foil electroscope, the pair of objects can be the two halves of a rectangular piece of thin metal foil. The interaction pushes the two halves apart because they have inertia, and they stay that way because the forces are equal.

The work done is explained as a transfer of momentum, say, from the electric field to the matter field aka piece of foil. Equivalently the work is done on the foil by "converting" electrical energy into motion. Or did I miss a really important physics 101 lecture here?

 

But you insisted earlier we're dealing with a solution that includes wavelengths for two quanta, deBroglie wavelengths, because the hydrogen atom is an electron plus a proton. Then you say

. You're saying we consider solutions for the kinetic energy of the electron, for one of, not two of, the particles under consideration in the atom, as you insisted? How peculiar.

 

Well, no. Can you give me an example of a simple Schrodinger description, with no oscillators, for the hydrogen atom? I haven't really heard that kind of thing before.

 

Here is how I would say what the hydrogen atom's wavefunction is.
.
It uses the Coulomb potential as a gauge--a fixed boundary--for the kinetic energy eigenstates of the electron. It's nonrelativistic, you can't solve the Schrodinger field equation for the electron + proton without fixing the proton in space, at the origin, conceptually a pointlike positive charge. Even in just one dimension there are no solutions if you don't.

You can't easily define a quantum harmonic oscillator without this idea of potential boundaries; I haven't seen any yet.