4am crazy idea/question about propogating waves.

[Moose]

Had a strange thought stay with me after an odd physics dream. I haven't thought this all the way through, nor researched it at all. But I do want to write this down before I forget. I've come up with some of my best mental reaches at 4am. Plus, if I don't offload it from my brain now, I won't sleep, and I'll have forgotten it by morning anyway.

It occurred to me that if we could watch a single pulse of a wave, from the frame of reference of the average position of that pulse, it would look like an edge-on circular-orbiting body (from the frame of reference of the average motion of that orbiting body).

This seems to work (at least in my sleepy mind) with both longitudinal waves and transverse waves (compression waves).

So here's my weird 4am awake-but-not-awake thought: Photons. A particle that behaves like a wave. Or a wave that behaves like a particle. Could that oddity be the photon we can detect in some kind of orbital motion around a counterpart we can't detect for some weird quantum-physics or higher-dimensional math reason I can't even begin to coherently fathom, let alone articulate? If such an "invisible elf" counterpart particle was of the same mass and motion (though phased), the wobble wouldn't necessarily be apparent/detectable, neh?

And if it had mass, might it account for some portion of dark matter?

Okay, so here's the question: What am I missing? And please keep in mind that I'm almost certainly not going to understand the answer unless it's in dummy-mod speak (aka, monosyllabic grunts and obscene gestures). Thanks, and I'm off to bed.

[Strange]

It occurred to me that if we could watch a single pulse of a wave, from the frame of reference of the average position of that pulse, it would look like an edge-on circular-orbiting body (from the frame of reference of the average motion of that orbiting body).

I don't see that. Surely it would look like a standing wave? Although I suspect the details depend on the relationship between the group velocity and phase velocity. And possibly the shape of the pulse. Do any of the diagrams here match what you are thinking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_velocity

[Moose]

I don't see that. Surely it would look like a standing wave?[/url]

The motion of a standing wave if you were to look at something strapped to the antinode, yes. I'd animate my dream if I could (although I've more or less lost it already.)

[WayneFrancis]

...
And if it had mass, might it account for some portion of dark matter?
...

I'll focus on this bit because it is the easiest to answer.
Well the answer is basically no. Dark matter is in a halo in the galaxy. Light won't hang around so that is one problem. The second is the amount of mass need. Photons constitute only a VERY small portion of the mass of a galaxy but dark matter is about 83%of the mass of a galaxy. Technically light does carry away some mass of the object that creates the photon but that is a VERY small amount.

maybe I'm missing what you really mean...because its 1am here and I should really be in bed.

[Moose]

I'll focus on this bit because it is the easiest to answer.

Okay, and thanks for that.

[trinitree88]

Had a strange thought stay with me after an odd physics dream. I haven't thought this all the way through, nor researched it at all. But I do want to write this down before I forget. I've come up with some of my best mental reaches at 4am. Plus, if I don't offload it from my brain now, I won't sleep, and I'll have forgotten it by morning anyway.

It occurred to me that if we could watch a single pulse of a wave, from the frame of reference of the average position of that pulse, it would look like an edge-on circular-orbiting body (from the frame of reference of the average motion of that orbiting body).

This seems to work (at least in my sleepy mind) with both longitudinal waves and transverse waves (compression waves).

So here's my weird 4am awake-but-not-awake thought: Photons. A particle that behaves like a wave. Or a wave that behaves like a particle. Could that oddity be the photon we can detect in some kind of orbital motion around a counterpart we can't detect for some weird quantum-physics or higher-dimensional math reason I can't even begin to coherently fathom, let alone articulate? If such an "invisible elf" counterpart particle was of the same mass and motion (though phased), the wobble wouldn't necessarily be apparent/detectable, neh?

And if it had mass, might it account for some portion of dark matter?

Okay, so here's the question: What am I missing? And please keep in mind that I'm almost certainly not going to understand the answer unless it's in dummy-mod speak (aka, monosyllabic grunts and obscene gestures). Thanks, and I'm off to bed.

Moose. Try looking through this link. Pete
SEE:http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...ing_the_light/

[Moose]

Moose. Try looking through this link. Pete
SEE:http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...ing_the_light/

Thanks, Pete. I see the immediate problem. If you're going along with the wave, you're not going to see any oscillation at all. The wave will appear frozen. I don't fully understand the rest of that page (which is okay), but I think I see the edge of what I'm missing.

Ah well.

Heh, of course, sometimes my 4am ideas are pretty weird. I woke from a dream, once, having a viable plan for solving world hunger. My ex woke as I stirred. We peered dreamily into each others' eyes. And with a smug look on my face (I definitely remember feeling _very_ smug in that moment), blurted out "Tomato soup". I instantly lost my dream forever.

[Cougar]

...blurted out "Tomato soup". I instantly lost my dream forever.

Whoa. You could have been Warhol.

[Grashtel]

So here's my weird 4am awake-but-not-awake thought: Photons. A particle that behaves like a wave. Or a wave that behaves like a particle. Could that oddity be the photon we can detect in some kind of orbital motion around a counterpart we can't detect for some weird quantum-physics or higher-dimensional math reason I can't even begin to coherently fathom, let alone articulate? If such an "invisible elf" counterpart particle was of the same mass and motion (though phased), the wobble wouldn't necessarily be apparent/detectable, neh?

There is nothing odd about the way photons act, all particles also have wave type behavior. A bit of quick Googling on the topic finds that diffraction patterns (evidence of wave type behavior) have been produced for molecules as big as carbon 60 buckyballs (see this page for info on it).

[Delvo]

I might be misreading your words & phrases, but it sounds like you're picturing photons traveling not in a straight path but in a path that waves back and forth.

If so, then it's a problem I wondered about for a while to, because all descriptions I ever heard of said photons/light should travel in a straight path, but I kept seeing illustrations showing a clearly wavy path, like this one. Eventually, though, based on some descriptions I finally got of wave-particle duality and how the particle in this case relates to the field concept for electromagnetic forces, I finally figured out that images like that one are just bad images, in a way, for creating the false impression of photons wiggling back & forth.

What's actually going on is better shown in images like this and this. The wavy line isn't the photon's path. The photon's path is the straight line you'd get if you drew a straight line right down the middle of the area the wavy line takes up, splitting it in half with a series of arches or half-circles on each side. The curvy line, instead of representing the photon's path, is a representation of the increasing and decreasing intensity of its electric field or magnetic field, like a graph in which a higher position or a position farther to the right represents not location but bigger/higher numbers.

My image of a single photon, since I figured that out, is not a dot or ball as it's usually shown in a lot of illustrations out there. It's more like an X or a plus-sign flying through space in the direction perpendicular to the paper it's drawn on, or a single jack, with six arms on three axes at right angles. One axis, easiest to represent by the sharp conical arms of the jack or sticking out from the paper right at the middle of the plus-sign, indicates the direction the photon is traveling. Another, representable by one line in the plus-sign or a pair of the jack's round bulbous arms which we could call the right-&-left pair of arms or the up-&-down pair of arms, represents the orientation of the photon's electrical field. The remaining ink-line or pair of bulbous arms on the jack would represent the orientation of the photon's magnetic field.

Then the last thing to add is that those two fields repeatedly get weaker & stronger and reverse direction; whichever field you're calling the left-&-right axis, for example, it repeatedly flips from right to left to right to left, and goes from practically no field strength to a maximum or "peak" field strength and back to practically none again. You can visualize this by having the arms of the plus-sign, or the bulbous arms of the jack in your mind, repeatedly getting longer and shorter in an alternating pattern so that when the up-arm is long the down-arm is short (actually absent) and when the right arm is long then the left arm is short (actually absent).

And that brings you to the origin of wavy line. Remember, that third axis, the conical arms of the jack or the line going through the paper instead of along it, is the photon's path. But while the photon is following that path through three-dimensional space, with its two pairs of "arms" perpendicular to it getting longer and shorter, the path traced through space by the outermost tip of either pair of field-arms turns out to be a curved path. To switch to another analogy, the wavy lines on a polygraph or seismograph have the same relationship with the direction the paper was traveling; they're a record not of what direction the paper was moving, but of how far to the right or left the needles were.

[WayneFrancis]

Thanks, Pete. I see the immediate problem. If you're going along with the wave, you're not going to see any oscillation at all. The wave will appear frozen. I don't fully understand the rest of that page (which is okay), but I think I see the edge of what I'm missing.

Ah well.

Heh, of course, sometimes my 4am ideas are pretty weird. I woke from a dream, once, having a viable plan for solving world hunger. My ex woke as I stirred. We peered dreamily into each others' eyes. And with a smug look on my face (I definitely remember feeling _very_ smug in that moment), blurted out "Tomato soup". I instantly lost my dream forever.

My 4am dream this morning was kind of like the running of the bulls...but instead of bulls trillions upon trillions of ants where used and they flow like a river about waist deep. :/