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Ah poo | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Just to throw another spanner into the equation
Authored by: Wol on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 08:04 AM EDT
Velocity (for example the speed of light) is measured as "distance divided
by time". But for a photon, t=0 - time does not exist.

That is probably one of the reasons we can't get to the speed of light - as we
get faster, t tends to zero, and if it ever reached it, the equations would blow
up in various orders of infinity.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Ah poo
Authored by: jesse on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 07:46 PM EDT
Take any small box.. put two ping-pong balls in it, one white, one black, close
the lid.

Shake the box.

In the dark, take one ball and put it in another box.
Now, you don't know what color is in what box.

Send one box to New York, Send the other to Los Angles.

Open one box. You instantly know what color the ball is in the other box.

I know it is an over simplification. but still - it appears equivalent.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

We need more measurements
Authored by: symbolset on Sunday, March 31 2013 @ 11:22 PM EDT

It may be that the measurement is the amount in excess of light speed the information needs to travel backwards in time to the photon divergence, times two. If the rate increases with the time or distance to divergence, this would be a clue that that is what is happening. That would be really neat, but it is unlikely. The difference between the divergence in speed for distance versus time would be informative.

More likely it's instrument error, or a measurement in some unknown dimension of the difference in reference frames between the measurement points. We're talking about really precise measurements of time and distance here over a significant spatial distance. We should remember the recent superluminal neutrino thing that turned out to be instrument error.

Measuring the same thing at three spatial distances with at least five different photon latency paths should shed more "light" on the matter. Maybe in 20 years we'll know what really happened here, or we'll have a good laugh about instrument calibration.

Regardless, really interesting science being attempted here.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

We need more measurements
Authored by: symbolset on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 02:32 AM EDT

It may be that the measurement is the amount in excess of light speed the information needs to travel backwards in time to the photon divergence, times two. If the rate increases with the time or distance to divergence, this would be a clue that that is what is happening. That would be really neat, but it is unlikely. The difference between the divergence in speed for distance versus time would be informative.

More likely it's instrument error, or a measurement in some unknown dimension of the difference in reference frames between the measurement points. We're talking about really precise measurements of time and distance here over a significant spatial distance. We should remember the recent superluminal neutrino thing that turned out to be instrument error.

Measuring the same thing at three spatial distances with at least five different photon latency paths should shed more "light" on the matter. Maybe in 20 years we'll know what really happened here, or we'll have a good laugh about instrument calibration.

Regardless, really interesting science being attempted here.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Just, make it so
Authored by: Ian Al on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 07:43 AM EDT
I've never understood all that atomic stuff.

I've seen the videos of someone holding an illuminated florescent tube under a
power distribution line and wondered how that could be.

I was told that electrical power was the flow of electrons (might have been by
my clever uncle, Mr Faraday). If you feed an antenna with electrons, electrical
power leaves the transmitter and can then travel millions of miles into space to
generate a flow of electrons in a receiving antenna. I'm told that light and
electricity can act as both waves and particles. Where do the 'received'
electrons come from? Are they pulled from antenna atoms by the received field?
Is the received field transmuted into new electrons?

In a power transmission line, the electrons can flow down the lines and return
via the ground. How does the florescent tube receive electrony stuff to make its
gasses cause the glow? Are electron particles always associated with another
material called electric field? Are they one and the same thing? Are radio waves
not waves of electrons? Do electron particles transform into field when they
leave the antenna? Does field travel from the power lines and transmute back
into electrons in the florescent tube?

When power is fed to an LED, some of it leaves as light. Electrical power is
'consumed' by the LED. Are some of the electrons transformed into photons? Is
this another material. If all the electrons go from the positive to the negative
power terminals, is the light another form of matter that is independent of
electricity? The electrons always have the charge of one electron volt. If this
is not reduced when it flows through the LED, where do the photons come from?

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. We know that there is not a
nucleus with electrons spinning around them. I suspect that the Universe is just
made up of fields that have attractive and repulsive properties. Some is
attractive/repulsive over distances, such as gravity and electricity/magnetism
and some is attractive/repulsive only at the molecular level. Molecules have
atoms inside that both attract and repel other atoms. If they did not, they
would collapse into a... whatever or just drift apart.

Even at close to zero temperature, molecules still have size. When they heat up,
they move apart. Is that the constituent atoms moving apart? Are the protons and
neutrons in separate space or do they all exist in more or less the same space?
What keeps protons and neutrons together in an atom? Does anything keep them
apart?

When we observe materials acting as a diffraction grating, what is it inside the
atoms that attracts or repels the passing waves. What is doing the diffraction?
If the waves are not material, but some sort of etheric field disturbance, why
would they be affected at all by atomic nuclei (not that we really know if the
concept of hard centred atoms makes any sense in a planetary way). We've seen
Brownian motion. What moves the molecules? How does one molecule move another
one? Is this another type of field? A heat field?

As with the LED, when very hot objects give off light, is that transmitting some
of the heat field? Are heat and light the same matter, but with a different
wavelength? If it is all one material, how does its wavelength get generated?

If the electrons, neutrons and protons in the hot object are not destroyed, is
the heat/light field a function of what keeps them both apart and together? Is
losing a proportion of their heat field what allows their attraction to overcome
their repulsion and for their size to decrease?

When I typed this, what property of atoms stopped my fingers from passing
straight through the keyboard without moving the keys. Is there some universal
matter I am missing? Don't tell me that the math made it so!

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

10,000 times faster than light
Authored by: JamesK on Monday, April 01 2013 @ 05:04 PM EDT
{
Put those together, and a photon of green light has a mass of 4x10^-36 kg. The
weight of that photon is about 3.9x10^-35 Newtons at the surface of the Earth.
}

Do the laws of physics apply to the things that determine the laws of physics?

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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