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Article #1218EINSTEINIANA'S RED HERRINGS: MASS OF THE PHOTON
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 06:47
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 06:47
85 lines
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5927 bytes
http://www.physlink.com/Education/askexperts/ae180.cfm My science data book says that the mass of a photon is zero. But how can photon exert radiation pressure, as it occurs in the sun? Asked by: Suraj Answer Actually what your science book says or is trying to say anyway,is that the photon's rest mass is zero. The concept of the rest mass derives from special relativity. The rest mass is the mass of a particle (in our case the photon) as measured by an observer who sees the particle still and with zero speed. In other words, the particle is at rest as far as this observer is concerned. Thus comes the term REST mass. But according to special relativity, light ALWAYS travels with the light speed c, and is NEVER at rest. And so it has zero REST mass. (...) ...though photons don't have rest mass, they do have energy and thus they have mass. The photons are wave particles. This means that they act as waves and as particles as well. This is the duality of the nature of light (and of every particles). And so as particles they have mass, and as waves they have frequency. The pressure they exert is due to the particle nature of light. It's easy now to understand the mechanism that causes this pressure. Answered by: George Moustris, M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineer, AUTH, Greece http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/wonderquest/photonmass.htm Question: Do photons have mass? If not, why does the gravitational field of a star bend passing light? Answer: "A particle like a photon is never at rest and always moves at the speed of light; thus it is massless," says Dr. Michael S. Turner, chair of the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. (...) You ask how a star's gravitational field can bend the path of a massless photon. This takes us into the realm of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The mass of the photon isn't attracted to the star's mass under Einstein's theory. Rather, the star's mass distorts space and the photon's path changes because the space is curved, says Paul Hewitt in his book Conceptual Physics. When the variability/constancy of the speed of light is concerned, "mass of photons" is a red herring and the above twists and turns show that Einsteinians do know that. What is relevant and what Einsteinians are trying to camouflage can be presented as follows: A light source on top of a tower of height h emits light with frequency f, speed c (relative to the source) and wavelength L. A receiver on the ground receives light with frequency f', speed c' (relative to the receiver) and wavelength L'. Einstein's 1911 solution (which is in accordance with Newton's emission theory of light) gives: f'=f(1+gh/c^2); c'=c(1+gh/c^2); L'=L A rocket of length h accelerates with acceleration g. A light source at the front end emits light with frequency f, speed c (relative to the source) and wavelength L. A receiver at the back end receives light with frequency f', speed c' (relative to the receiver) and wavelength L'. At the moment of reception, the receiver has speed v relative to the light source at the moment of emission. Einstein's equivalence principle gives: f'=f(1+v/c); c'=c+v; L'=L All those results given by Newton's emission theory of light were experimentally confirmed in 1960 when Pound and Rebka measured the gravitational redshift factor to be 1+gh/c^2. Nobody noticed this important confirmation of the emission theory (rather, Einsteinians announced a glorious confirmation of Divine Albert's Divine Theory) because Einstein, after 1911, had managed to confuse everything: http://www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm "Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from: http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/einstein-papers/1911_35_898-908.pdf ). It predated the full formal development of general relativity by about four years. You can find an English translation of this paper in the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity' beginning on page 99; you will find in section 3 of that paper Einstein's derivation of the variable speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is: c'=c0(1+phi/c^2) where phi is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the speed of light co is measured......You can find a more sophisticated derivation later by Einstein (1955) from the full theory of general relativity in the weak field approximation....For the 1955 results but not in coordinates see page 93, eqn (6.28): c(r)=[1+2phi(r)/c^2]c. Namely the 1955 approximation shows a variation in km/sec twice as much as first predicted in 1911." Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com
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X-Google-Thread: 237b8ad48,1cfd17d7e136388c,start X-Google-Attributes: gid237b8ad48,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!c2g2000yqi.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.astrophysique Subject: EINSTEINIANA'S RED HERRINGS: MASS OF THE PHOTON Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:47:00 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 85 Message-ID: <6338bcb1-d720-422b-a00c-554057bc2bed@c2g2000yqi.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 89.215.201.39 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1250318820 29373 127.0.0.1 (15 Aug 2009 06:47:00 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 06:47:00 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: c2g2000yqi.googlegroups.com; posting-host=89.215.201.39; posting-account=Lz-LbgoAAABPDavKeW-eYeobwLHD_cvQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)