🚀 go-pugleaf

In <4NOV199211055734@csa1.lbl.gov> sichase@csa1.lbl.gov (SCOTT I CHASE) writes:

>In article <13379@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, dbc@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bryan Carpenter) writes...
>>In <1992Nov3.175155.27867@impmh.uucp> dsg@impmh.uucp (Dave Gordon) writes:
>>>...
>> 
>>>This relates to something I have been wondering about for a while now:
>>>is there an upper bound on the freqency of electromagnetic radiation?
>> 
>>You can increase the energy of a photon indefinitely just
>>by boosting it into a fast enough reference frame.  So the answer
>>is: no, there is no upper limit on the energy.

>As I tried to make clear yesterday, this presupposes that the physics of 
>high energy QED is the same as at low energy, a fact against which there
>is at least some indirect suggestion (I hesitate to use the word "evidence",
>though some would call it that).

>...

>Clearly, you get into a nasty tangle trying to imagine such a modification,
>and the implications that it would have for special relativity.  But this
>does not imply, as Bryan infers, that it could not happen.  It just means
>that we don't understand the behavior of photons at energies higher than 
>we have ever studied them.  

Well ok.  I certainly don't want to get into any argument about what
might happen near the Plank scale.
I thought Dave was making arguments based on standard special-
relativistic effects like Lorentz-contraction and mass increase
possibly leading to a gravitational collapse.  I just meant to point out
that that logic wasn't right, assuming Lorentz invariance.
 
>-Scott

Bryan