Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light. (Dante)
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Substance, and accident, and their operations, All interfused together in such wise That what I speak of is one simple light. (Dante) |
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| Einstein, Helmholtz, Wigner, Sherrington, Mach, Schrodinger, Bohr, Tomonaga, Aharanov, Bohm | ||||||
Einstein Wigner Sherrington Schrödinger Bohr Tomonaga Aharonov Bohm Mach Cao Wittgenstein |
All the
fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the
answer to the question: "What are light quanta?" Of course today every
rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself.
Einstein
 [I]f one entity
is influenced by another entity, in all known cases the latter one is
also influenced by the former. The most striking and originally the
least expected example for this is the influence of light on matter,
most obviously in the form of light pressure. That matter influences
light is an obvious fact — if it were not so, we could not see objects.
The influence of light on matter is, however, a more subtle effect and
is virtually unobservable under the conditions which surround us [...]
Since matter clearly influences the content of our consciousness, it is
natural to assume that the opposite influence also exists, thus
demanding the modification of the presently accepted laws of nature
which disregard this influence.
Wigner  It
turned out that,
once these foundations had been laid, symmetry could
be
of great help in elucidating the general character of the
spectra.
Weyl If
you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow
light, he will tell you that it is transversal
electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590
millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow
come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of
vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person
whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.
Schrödinger
We now proceed to the derivation of the laws of geometrical optics from the laws of wave optics. A rigorous and general derivation, however, requires a considerable amount of advanced mathematics so that we shall not go into details here. We shall be satisfied with observing the essential points by taking the simple example given above. The
problem is again that of the refraction
of monochromatic light
[...]
holds, as is apparent from the figure. In other words, the refractive index nis inversely proportional to the wave length of the light wave in the respective media; i.e., n = k''/l The
proportionality constant k'', however, may depend
on the frequency or, in other words, on the color
of the light.
Tomonaga
Now let us turn to the central topic, the geometrization of fundamental physics. The starting-point here is the geometrization of gravity: making Poincaré symmetry local removes the flatness of space-time and requires the introduction of some geometrical structures of space-time, such as metric, affine connection, and curvature, which are correlated with gravity. The internal space defined at each space-time point is called a fiber, and the union of this internal space with space-time is called fiber-bundle space. Then we find that the local gauge symmetries remove the 'flatness' of the fiber-bundle space since we assume that the internal space directions of a physical system at different space-times points are different.Cao  |
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 Eugene Wigner For instance a star
which we perceive. The energy scheme deals with it, describes the
passing of radiation thence into the eye, the little light image of it
formed at the bottom of the eye, the ensuing photochemical action in
the retina, the trains of action potentials traveling along the nerve
to the brain, the further electrical disturbance in the brain, the
action potentials streaming thence to the muscles of eyeballs and of
the pupil, the contraction of them sharpening the light image and
placing the best seeing part of the retina under it. The best 'seeing'?
That is where the energy scheme forsakes it. It tells us nothing of any
'seeing'. Everything but that.
Sherrington
 Erwin
("Mad Dog") Schrödinger
[It] was found possible to account for the atomic stability, as well as for the empirical laws governing the spectra of the elements, by assuming that any reaction of the atom resulting in a change of its energy involved a complete transition between two so-called stationary quantum states and that, in particular, the spectra were emitted by a step-like process in which each transition is accompanied by the emission of a monochromatic light quantum of an energy just equal to that of an Einstein photon. Bohr
E = hv In classical mechanics, we recall that potentials cannot have such significance because the equation of motion involves only the field quantities themselves. For this reason, the potentials have been regarded as purely mathematical auxiliaries, while only the field quantities were thought to have a direct physical meaning. In quantum mechanics, the essential difference is that the equations of motion of a particle are replaced by the SchrÖdinger equation for a wave. This SchrÖdinger equation is obtained from a canonical formalism, which cannot be expressed in terms of the fields alone, but which also requires the potentials. Indeed, the potentials play a role, in SchrÖdinger equation, analogous to that of the index of refraction in optics. [...] The above discussion suggests that some further development of the theory is needed. Two possible directions are clear. First, we may try to formulate a nonlocal theory in which, for example, the electron could interact with a field that was some finite distance away. Then there would be no trouble in interpreting these results, but, as is well known, there are severe difficulties in the way of doing this. Secondly, we may retain the present theory and, instead, we may give a further new interpretation to the potentials. Aharanov,
Bohm
A color is a physical object a soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon temperatures, and so forth. Mach
The science of colours becomes a
speculation as truly mathematical as any other part of
physics.
Newton Is
there such a thing as a 'natural history of colors' and to what extent
is it analogous to a natural history of plants? Isn't the latter
temporal, the former non-temporal? Wittgenstein |
quanta action color spectra EM photon E = hv optics refraction nonlocal |
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