Main
Sequence Page 8
Electrical and Magnetic Prisms
Contents
Introduction
Introduction
This is the truly-dreaded page 8 in which I will attempt to design and
build electrical and magnetic prisms. The premise is quite simple
minded: If a particle of light is an oscillatory electric field at
right angles to an oscillatory magnetic field, and if electric and
magnetic fields can interact and apply force to other particles, then
why can't I build a
device that bends the path of light using magnets or electric fields.
This is really a question of mutually interacting photons. People in
the know will say things like "the EM field is linear so photons do not
interact with one another, except at high energies." To them I say
humbug. What if I am flying by some ordinary photons at
0.999999999999999999 times the speed of light. All of a sudden no
matter what you may think of them in your sluggish reference frame, to
me they are high energy. Are you saying they can interact in my
reference frame but not yours, producing some positronium that I can
split into electrons and positrons with my specially created high
voltage plates? Because then I have a positron and you don't coexisting
in the same reality.
Incidentally this fragmentary placeholder is here for precisely this
reason: Aside from virtual pair interactions I have no idea about
bending a photon path using other photons. The premise for this page is
to the best of my knowledge impossible. But the point of the page is to
better understand why it's
impossible.
What Next?
After this early run at basic physics and a series of other fairly
simple topics, I think
I'd like to switch gears to an element of earth science where things
get much more complicated:
Previous
Next
Home