Posted on 09/25/2013 3:40:05 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Was it green, blue, or red? We need to know if any of these MIT personnel are Sith.
oh good.
Can we also get the exploding rays from Flash Gordon? Just simple antimatter light?
Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin
Must be a distant relative.
From the smart side of the family that dropped the r.
Is he saying that they've created matter out of photons?
Very interesting!
(..and Neverdem, you deserve your own ping occasionally.)
The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other – shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another.
Massless particles ? really ?
Wouldn't that be a direct challenge to Einstein's theory ?
How could gravity affect something that has no mass ?
That's the whole point of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Gravity is essentially a manifestation of the curvature of space-time, which affects everything, including photons.
Bookmarking.
then used lasers to cool the cloud of atoms to just a few degrees above absolute zero. Using extremely weak laser pulses, they then fired single photons into the cloud of atoms. i would truly like to understand how lasers and cool something let alone how to loose a single photon from a source...
bump
Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other
Einstein's Theory of General Relativity says that they do interact with each other.
"What if all particles have no inherent mass, but instead gain mass by passing through a field? This field, known as a Higgs field, could affect different particles in different ways. Photons could slide through unaffected, while W and Z bosons would get bogged down with mass. In fact, assuming the Higgs boson exists, everything that has mass gets it by interacting with the all-powerful Higgs field, which occupies the entire universe."
Is this pertinent?
When our grandkids say molon labe, they’ll be talking about their light sabers!
You sound like me: wishing you had taken more physics!
yup, HS and one semester in college was NOT enough... i'm sure we could understand it if explained, i just can't suss it out on my own
It does so by distorting space - the old steel ball on a rubber membrane example.
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