Why not variable speed of light?

Aether waves are the medium. That's it.

Quantum mechanics follows naturally from this assumption. Why do you think it's called wave mechanics?

The double slit experiment is perfectly natural and normal. Information can be thought of as ones and zeroes, right? Well here is a one for you. But don't abandon information because, here is a sine wave.

 

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So what are acceleration fields made of?

 

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There is a possibility that other universes with a different speed of light coexist with our universe. It would make interplanetary travel easier if we could travel through an adjacent universe with a speed of light c' = 100c. Theoretical physicists should be thinking about these things.

 

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Just putting my my two cents... the speed of light itself isn't a constant... the speed of light in the "vacuum" of space, or c, is the constant. However, we have slowed down light in lab simulations, though I dont' believe we've managed to speed it up beyond c.

 

Yes, c is the speed of light in a vacuum. It's always possible to slow light down by passing it through a medium with a permittivity >1. There are other ways.

 

Could it just be taking a longer path, due to bouncing around, but still always going at c?

 

Sci - the test was run using laser light of a very specific frequency - they actually managed to "freeze" the beam of laser energy at one point... it was rather cool - I'm about to head into work, but i'll see if I can dig up the article for ya!

 

Physicists don't believe that an aether exists. But if you have a medium made of the set of waves that obey \(c=\lambda f\) then look what happens...

Slow light is just a group wave, a group of EM waves with different frequencies. Slow light occurs when a propagating pulse is substantially slowed down by the interaction with the medium in which the propagation take place [wiki]. If light can move slowly as a pulse, isn't that what particles with mass do? Aren't particles with mass called de Broglie waves? Now it all makes sense.

 

Firstly you're just pulling numbers out of your backside. Secondly all periodic waves satisfy \(v = \lambda f\), it's practically a definition. You ask "How could light ever be anything but c?" but you haven't justified the invariance, you've just stated some properties of waves in general.

And if the universe were filled with matter exactly the same could be said for sound waves moving through that matter. Except that the sound waves wouldn't be Lorentz invariant yet light is. None of the equations or properties you give are unique to light, all waves can carry momentum, have a speed-wavelength-frequency relationship etc. As a result nothing you've said explains why light doesn't behave like a wave in a medium when Lorentz transforms are considered. Yes, we get it, you like the notion of an aether. But nothing you've said so far gets you any closer to explaining why light doesn't behave like all other waves in media.

Seriously? You're just going to wave your hand and so "Oh and this explained all particles too". Does it also predict the football scores and make you breakfast in the morning?

And we're back to your "I follow my common sense", despite the fact your own beliefs are self contradictory in regards to that.

It's called wave mechanics because it involves oscillatory behaviour. That doesn't mean an aether 'naturally' leads to quantum mechanics. I want you to back up that claim. Please state clearly your initial assumptions and derive the Schrodinger equation from them. That would demonstrate your aether concept can lead to quantum mechanics. Simply saying "Well they both involve waves!" isn't enough. Classical electromagnetism involves waves but it doesn't lead to quantum mechanics. Fluid mechanics involves waves but it doesn't lead to quantum mechanics. Playing "match the buzzword" only serves to illustrate how naive you are about science.

How in any way does that retort what he said?

Why don't you just ask god or your alien friends to tell you? Why do you need theoretical physicists to do it? Theoretical physicists have to actually show how they arrive at conclusions from initial postulates. You don't pick a conclusion and try to retroactively justify it. That's how religions work. Religions and wacko hacks.

No.

 

I used a range of wavelengths from the diameter of the universe down to the Planck constant. I wanted to illustrate a point that the aether medium is made of waves as a set of wavelength-frequency pairs.
The velocity depnds upon the properties of the medium that is waving. The medium of our universe has electric and magnetic fields. So they satisfy the equation \(c = \frac{1}{sqrt{\epsilon_0 \mu_0}}\).

I'll just make particles with mass out of groups of EM frequencies. I'll create something to make the waves stick together. I will allow each frequency to have a k-vector that can be oriented in the x-y-z directions. That will slow the group of waves down to velocities slower than c.

Gotta go.

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You spent the last 90 years developing quantum mechanics. You have these solutions to the Schrodinger equation called wave-functions. Then you insist that they are not real things, they are just math that describes reality at the quantum scale. The problem with your argument is that it's missing a step somewhere between a) wave-functions describe nature and b) nature exists. Physicists don't like anything ontological. So I just inserted the missing "ontological" piece. Wave-functions describe the aether. The aether is made of aether waves. You can kind of tell this by the presence of the EM spectrum. Time dilation/length contraction are effects that depend upon \(\beta/c\) Hint! Hint! The speed of light is showing up in lots of places in physics. Nobody talks about the speed of protons.

The vacuum of space is made of waves. Particles are made of made waves too. Quantum mechanics describes the details. What happens when there is a gravity potential in the vacuum of space? All of these waves will frequency shift ever so slightly, unless your near a black hole, then they frequency shift a lot.

So the entire frequency spectrum frequency shifts just a little bit in the presense of a gravity field. The frequency spectrum inside of your rocket ship will also frequency shift a little bit when you turn on the thrusters. There are time dilation fields that occur as well.

So the aether waves are interconnected with gravity, acceleration fields, and gravitational potential energy. When gravity curves space-time, masses fall, frequencies blushift. Everybody knows that gravity curves space-time. But nobody asks "what is space-time and how do we curve it withou gravity?"

I did. The only conceivable way to travel faster than c is to look for a coexisting universe with a speed of light faster than yours. The details are very inteerstting, but I don't think you would appreciate them.

De Broglie waves, also called matter waves, are particles with mass that have a wavelength \(\lambda = \frac{h}{mv}\) where mv is mass times velocity. I don't know why you would say "no" to this. De Broglie waves are just another hint that everything is made of waves.

 

You do if you see something as valuable as acceleration field generator technology. Can you understand that such a technology could help a lot of people? I looked at black holes and I noticed that photons blue shift (frequency shift) on the way in. I noticed that the speed of light is this reoccuring theme in physics. There is this one speed, the fastest speed, that nothing can go faster than. As you approach c, strange things start to happen. Time slows down, length contracts. The only thing that travels the speed of light is light. Now light is a wave. But if you look at waves, they don't act like particles at all (except for being absorbed as a photon particle). They have wavelength, frequency, period (time), momentum, and energy. They have everything that we use in physics except charge. Oh, but EM waves have electric-magnetic fields. In fact, virtual photons are the carriers of electromagnetism.

Nobody really knows what gravity is. But it has qualities that are very desireable. It makes things accelerate. That could be useful. It didn't take too long to figure out that light (this really special thing in physics) connects with gravity as a frequency shift.

The old stale thinking of the day is that gravity frequency shifts light, but not the other way around. Everyone thinks there is this causality mandate. But that is ridiculous. nobody has performed an experiment. So nobody knows for sure.

 

That I did not know, virtual photons carriers of electromagnetism?
How do you detect something "virtual"?

 

Within the context of what we currently know, real photons are the carriers of electromagnetism. Virtual photons play an important role in some portions of QM theory and vacuum energy. There is no significant experimental evidence, to suggest that virtual particles are the carrier of electromagnetism or gravity.

While there may be and probably are portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not within our ability to detect and measure, within the range that we are currently aware of, we can easily detect electromagnetic waves through the effect that they have on the atoms of which we and all of our detectors and measuring devices are composed.

We see photons in the visible spectrum. We measure the changes in electric circuits that result from exposure to radio waves. We measure the heat that exposure to microwave and other EM radiations generates... All of these represent changes that occur within or to, atoms and/or complex materials made of atoms, exposed to EM radiation or photons.

Virtual particles, including virtual photons are far more elusive. There are a few experiments, like those involving the Casimir and Dynamical Casimir effects, that support the existence of virtual particles/photons. If you are interested in how something that is virtual is detected look up those experiments.

It may be that we will come to understand the origin of gravity within the context of photon like particles, the as yet theoretical graviton. We are not quite there yet, though there are what appear to be some promising theoretical models. That would be the subject of quantum gravity.

Could virtual particles, as in zero point fluctuations of the vacuum, be involved in what we experience as gravity? Yes, but so far we have no completely successful model or theory. That is to say, theories that approach inertia and gravity from this perspective, have not been successful in duplicating the scope and accuracy of general relativity, or our observations and experience, of either inertia or gravity.

I have been trying to work my way through a number of papers, on the inertia side of this question. I cannot say that I completely understand, though the more in read the more questions I have and the idea(s) are interesting. As far as Gra ity is concerned.., there the work moves into the realm of quantum gravity and far beyond me...

 

OnlyMe, nice write up.

What roll does time play in making light speed constant? It seems to me that light will always travel the same distance in one second no matter how fast or slow that second is?

 

Time is a critical component!

However, I don't see that a new discussion of "time" can add anything. In practice time, the speed of light and distance have all become comingled deffinitions.

The fact that time is a subjective observation of the rate of change, pushes it far into the realm of philosophy. As far as experience is concerned time does not change locally for any observer and clock sharing the same inertial frame of reference. It is only when we try to compare our clock to a clock in another frame of reference, either inertial or accelerating relative to our own, that confussion begins to raise its ugly head.

If we assume that our frame of reference is somehow special, it might also be said that as light moves through a gravity well its velocity is not constant, relative to our local measurements... GR describes both space and time in a dynamic way that suggests that no matter where an observer is, for them time will move at the same rate, reguardless of how it appears, from any other frame of reference.

Since, at least at cosmological scales, time and the speed of light have become almost one and the same, think LYs as both a measure of time and distance, there is perhaps some loose association in the following...

In another thread James R posted,

I believe that is consistent with how Einstein viewed things in at least his early years. I don't believe that is the modern view, even within GR. But thying to explain it in classical lay terminology, always leaves something to be desired and often paints a misleading picture.

 

If you are travelling at the constant speed of 60 mph's, then that speed is only ever 60 mph, there isn't any deviation in a constant.

Why is lightspeed a constant? for one, it's a standardised measurement, The value is a measurement of both time spent and distance travelled within a vacuum. There are obviously alterations to speed through including bodies of mass (gravity), field diffraction and this is often seen in the various abstract mathematical formula's to compensate for the differences.

Can light go faster? There are potentially ways to create various effects, however it doesn't alter the speed, just the apparatus and the experimental environment.
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The speed of light can be considered Q.E.D., it could be speculated that one of the main reasons for it's consistency can actually be considered to exist because it's a fundamental not just to the universe we observe but the future of things that we are currently in the process of learning to build. For instance the usage of fibre-optics for networking computers together would not be possible if such constants weren't existent and entropy reigned.

 

It does, in two ways:

In one, you have frequency doppler shifting (red shifting or blue shifting in the frequency of the light). Basically, what this does is add or remove energy relative to the observer.

It also does in another way, sort of, but it's a little bit harder to explain- due to relativity you have a consequence called 'length contraction' Although this only vaguely resembles what you're talking about, you should look into it to better understand relativity.

I hope that helped. It's a tricky subject

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