richard.gadsden

Comment Threads

• bellinghman commented on It's made out of meat.
  you only get wave-phenomena with large numbers It appears to me to be the case (from the slow speed experiment) that that 'large number' is unity. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never considered 1 to be a large number. Yes, I am perfectly aware of the particulate properties of light. I'm not going to argue with the work on photo-electricity that got Einstein a Nobel, an effect which cannot plausibly be explained without individual quanta of energy. But you seem to be arguing that because light is particles, it's not a wave. If so, you're now arguing...
• Charlie Stross commented on It's made out of meat.
  Of course something is "wrong" with physics; if it wasn't, our physicists would be looking for a new job! Actually, there's probably more than one thing wrong. Just as classical physics began to unravel in the latter half of the 19th century around a few odd edge cases (Olbers' Paradox, the ultraviolet catastrophe, and the non-existence of the luminiferous ether -- have I forgotten any others? "Fixing" those three gave us a non-static universe, quantum mechanics and relativity) so we have some loose ends today: the failure of QM and relativity to hook up, the dark matter problem/inflation, the matter/antimatter...
• bellinghman commented on It's made out of meat.
  The other thing that was going to blow an interesting hole in physics as understood at the end of the 19th Century was that funny pitchblende stuff that seemed to stay a little bit warmer than it should. And that led to radioactivity, and an explanation of why Lyell's deep time worked after all....
• bellinghman commented on It's made out of meat.
  Does Not Follow. (Or in other words, rejection of theory A does not mean that theory B bears any greater relationship to the truth.)...
• bellinghman commented on It's made out of meat.
  Is that an instruction or a question? Have you calculated just how bright a light source needs to be to ensure that, in a small twin-slit interference experiment, the majority of the photons aren't single? The individual photon in your average physics class experiment last on the order of 10 nanoseconds. So you need to ensure your light source is at least 10^8 photons per second on the area of the slits to get to the point that you can talk about photons existing at the same time, let alone interfering. This is why I'm not surprised by the phenomenon...