The nature of light
How about ghosts? do you believe in them? Can you imagine an universe where they exist? Or it's better if they don't? Those thoughts came into my mind after several days of wandering into quantum science fiction.
When I was a kid I spent several days looking into Einstein's relativity. The fourth dimension was kind of magical. What was that? Why it was so important? Why I could not find books that explained it in a manner anyone could understand? Somehow I managed to to get a glimpse of the theory and the importance of the subject.
This theory was based on a premiss, that the speed of light is constant. Because light speed is constant (it's almost the same as saying that information speed is constant) we have to adjust time on the speed of the subject, the fourth dimension. Of course the theory is more than that, it was also about gravity, the geometry of space/time and E=mc2, the energy/matter formula of nuclear age.
Latter I found quantum physics. This was stranger than life. It looked like something out of a mad man's delusions. The problem is that it made predictions that worked. Today the "Graal" of physics is the unified theory. It's far away and I imagine it will be away for a long time.
What I found most interesting about quantum physics it's one of the question it asks, it's an old question, almost mystical, "What is the nature of light?".
We got many answers already, just to get more questions after. Now we have a duality to explain. The photon, the basic amount of light, can be thrown at something an it will break, but if just one goes through a grid it will create an interference pattern on the other side, just like it had a ghost travelling at his side. So, does light have ghosts? What is light?
When I was a kid I spent several days looking into Einstein's relativity. The fourth dimension was kind of magical. What was that? Why it was so important? Why I could not find books that explained it in a manner anyone could understand? Somehow I managed to to get a glimpse of the theory and the importance of the subject.
This theory was based on a premiss, that the speed of light is constant. Because light speed is constant (it's almost the same as saying that information speed is constant) we have to adjust time on the speed of the subject, the fourth dimension. Of course the theory is more than that, it was also about gravity, the geometry of space/time and E=mc2, the energy/matter formula of nuclear age.
Latter I found quantum physics. This was stranger than life. It looked like something out of a mad man's delusions. The problem is that it made predictions that worked. Today the "Graal" of physics is the unified theory. It's far away and I imagine it will be away for a long time.
What I found most interesting about quantum physics it's one of the question it asks, it's an old question, almost mystical, "What is the nature of light?".
We got many answers already, just to get more questions after. Now we have a duality to explain. The photon, the basic amount of light, can be thrown at something an it will break, but if just one goes through a grid it will create an interference pattern on the other side, just like it had a ghost travelling at his side. So, does light have ghosts? What is light?
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