Actually photons have mass they can be trapped by sufficient gravitational feilds, I cant explain it as well as somebody out of highschool minght be able to but if there is anyone on the forums with a decent understanding of quantum mechanics they would be able to tell you that a photon acts not only as a "massles" particle of energy (or wave) but it can also be a electron which does have mass... like I said its getting into quantum mechanics which I dont quite have a full (or partial
) understanding of....
not bad coming from a sophmore right?
Daniel Coble
EDIT: the bose einstine condensate is capable of slowing light down to about the speed of a bicycle
Frankly, I don't really 'get' the more complicated quantum mechanics, besides the basic Bohr/Heisenberg/Schroedinger tenets like - wave/particle duality, quantized energy levels, distinct quantum numbers (n, l, m, s) with one and only one electron for each number, photoelectric effect: the 'simple' Modern Physics where the photon is in fact a massless particle. We've still got just 3 spatial and 1 temporal dimension, and our subatomic particles are still limited to proton, neutron, electron, positron, and photon. When this simplicity is gone, I am sure I will miss it, and file it with geometrical optics, frictionless surfaces, the small angle theorem, and other fun but ill-fated assumptions.
My point is simply to dispel the assumption of a previous poster that a photon was a mass particle contained within an atom, and gained or lost during ionization like an electron. We treat the photons as quanta of energy, and an high energy electron can become a photon and a low energy electron, or a photon and a low energy electron can become a high energy electron, photons can be gained or lost without changing the mass of the element - they are not conserved during events like an electron is (they can be spontaneously created or destroyed). Only the energy that they contain is conserved.
Bose-Einstein condensation? That's when the windows get fogged up in the winter, right? :sick2: I usually just use my car's defroster.