[SpiralEye]

I told my wife that I had often wondered if matter could be infinitely divisible into increasingly smaller particles. She told me her idea; that matter might be actually composed of light. Now, I can't account for the varying nature of all particles based on that (and who can?) but it interests me nonetheless. E=mc^2 Does basically state that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. So, could it be that a little bit of matter is, at it's most fundamental level, composed of light? It sounds more feasible to me than my idea. And certainly easier to prove, well, maybe at some point, anyway.

[Bishop_Six]

*stares blankly*

[Lunatique]

Owwww. My head hurts.

Wouldn't it be funy if our maker came down from the sky, smacked us upside the head and said, "Dammit, quit trying to make sense of all the shit I created. I don't even remember what the f-ck I did all those eons ago."

[Red Leader]

What Lukias said. It all has to do with wavelength. I'll be damned if I can remember the details though, I took all this in astronomy 10 years ago.

[SpiralEye]

Bishop_Six--*stares back* *tries to hold back a blink* *eyeball dries out, uncontrollable blink!* Awwww. I lose another staring contest. Dang.

Lunatique--Um, no. Not that funny. Kinda scary, actually.

Lukias, Red Leader--Well, fer dang cool! That's slicker than a wet possum in a snowstorm! I'll have to tell my wife. 'Course, maybe she's already thought of that and just didn't tell me yet.

[Chris]

Lunatique: not only is that scary, who are you referring to? No one created everything.

[tzekin]

SpiralEye MIT's chat room is a few clicks away

[Perplexer]

yeah, but what is light? i mean if you say it consists of light, then what is light made of? it's not radiation, its not waves (like sound) and its not particles. science is unsure about what it actually is.

come on, it's all just illusion anyways. think about it: if atoms are basically not more than vibrating positive and negative charges, then what is matter?
and what is a charge? its not substance, its not material, its nothing really. its just a swinging motion, back and forth- without anything thats swinging. know what i mean? it's really freakin bizzarre and therefore i ain't taking anything for granted, except for one thing: it's all not what it seems.
you betcha i am curious to see the solution to this riddle when my time comes.

[Bishop_Six]

quote

Quote:

Lunatique: not only is that scary, who are you referring to? No one created everything.

Chris: We all have differing opinions on this matter. And if you believe differently than I do, I will accept it. So, please do us a favor and have a little respect for what others believe. We could easily go back and forth saying, "yes, there is... no there isn't..." but that would go nowhere in a hurry.

[Chris]

i was just asking a question...

[jzero]

Dudes...

E=mc^2
[Energy = mass * (velocity of light squared)]

therefore

m = E/c^2
[mass = Energy / (velocity of light squared)]

Is that clear?
(If my scientific notation/conversion is wrong, then pleae correct me.)

[ex]

My finger could be compused of light? That is kinda hard to believe. We're light bulbs.

Just kiddin guys.

[Frost]

Evrything is lite, like teh divign lite of God.

[Chris]

Ok, lets try to keep religion out of this, you don't see me bringing it up...

[Red Leader]

Ah, well, it gets much more complicated when you throw in the fact that many theo/physicists think that matter is comprised of not particles or waves, but one dimentional string loops in an eleven dimentional space. Somehow fluctuations in that string's movement alters how it's represented physically in our three dimentional (plus time) space, as the fundimental particles of nature. This means that light and matter are probably just manifestations of that "string" in different states. Thusly, quarks and photons are like shadows of a greater reality, or ripples on the surface of the cosmos.
When you get into it, this seems to expain a lot of things, like how light reacts like a wave or a particle depending on what you do to it, and how particles tend to dissapear and reapear in approximately the same quantity and position all the time.

I've read a bunch of books on this stuff, and it all often comes across as convincingly as when they used to explain stars as being pinholes in the cosmic curtain. I don't think physicists can ever really know what is going on, any more than a 2 dimentional drawing could tell you about the paper it was drawn on.

[shardik]

the speed of light is not the same as light (as an object.. whatever)...

but spiraleye.. is ur wife saying that everything is made up of extremely dense light? can light have density?

i dunno i only took high school physics
cool theory but i think that would be impossible to prove tho

what do you and your wife do that u started discussing this

[gLitterbug]

I think if we dig deep enough, we will find out that everything consists out of 0 and 1 and that we are only a highly sophisticated computer program (similar to the Sims).

So we are all entertainers, I hope I�m a good one!

['Nectarine-]

eeek..

light:
a small part of the electromagnetical wave spectrum:

E=h.f
E... Energy of a Photon
h... Planck Constant
f... Frequency

for photons: m = 0 (at least in real/non complex space)

so youre made up of electromagnetical waves/particles/superstrings and not of light.
I knew that that astronomy fable would come in handy some time. =)

---------
*Rachel*

[ToastyKen]

I was really into this stuff around early high school and read up on a lot of laymen's physics books.

You shouldn't think of matter as being "made of light". Firstly, I'm guessing by "light" you mean "radiation", as "light" is basically just the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye (as opposed to radio waves or microwaves).

Anyway, think of it more as.. everything has both mass and energy.. If you smash a particle and an antiparticle together, they turn into gamma rays with the same amount of energy that was in the particles.

Another way of thinking of it is this "duality" principle.. Everything has a "particle" aspect and a "wave" aspect.. That means that an electron, say, can move around like a particle if you look at it a certain way, but if you look at it another way, it acts like a wave (it diffracts, etc.).

So it's not so much that matter is "made of light", but that everything has both mass and energy.. everything is both a particle and a wave.

Now.. what exactly IS mass and energy? Afaik, we don't really know yet. We were going to find out more via these bigass particles called "Higgs bosons" by building the Superconducting Super-Collider, but Congress cut its funding.

Oh.. And I just wanted to add that, as far as I know, matter is NOT infinitely divisible.. that protons and neutrons can be broken down into quarks, but that's it.. and electrons are just electrons.. and that's it. Again, that, afaik, is just what we think at the moment.

(Disclaimer: I'm a CS student, not a Physics one, and the only physics courses I've taken in college are the required ones and a special relativity one, so some of what I said above may not be correct, as I've never taken a college-level course in quantum mechanics or general relativity.)


Some good laymen's books to try:

The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature by Heinz Pagels (out of print, but you might find a used copy or one in a library) is a nice laymen's overview of quantum physics.

Black Holes and Time Warps : Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne, Caltech Professor.. I HIGHLY recommend this book. It interlaces the personal history of some famous researchers like Einstein and Chandrasekhar (sp?) with nice explanations.. And the last couple of chapters are about Kip Thorne's actual research into wormholes and time travel. Respectable time travel research.. How can you turn that down? =)

The God Particle by Leon Lederman, former director of Fermilab talks about Higgs bosons

Or I recommend just going to your local library and looking up laymen's books on quantum physics. It's really fascinating stuff.

[ May 30, 2001: Message edited by: ToastyKen ]

[SpiralEye]

tzekin--lol

jzero--that's kind of what I was saying with the original post. Makes sense when you think of it. A little matter = a whole lotta energy. So those sci-fi stories where humans evolve to become being of pure, unfettered energy? Poppycock. We got more energy in our little fingers now. We just can't tap into it quite the same as we can a battery.

shardik--Some of the others' explanations made sense to me as to how matter could be made up of light. And as for the conversation, I said, "Dear, so you think matter is infinitely divisible?" And she said no. etc. I just ponder these things sometimes.

Red Leader--I think a lot of wierd theories have come about to try to explain seemingly aberrant qualities of sub-atomic particles. I have another idea as to why such particles sometimes seem to react randomly, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

gLitterbug--nah. We're too nice to be programs

'Nectarine--Not makin' sense, there. What you wrote seems to support the idea,not contradict it. ?

Lukias--'cause green monkeys gotta eat sumthin!

ToastyKen--thanks. So answers the lurking member of the MIT chat room :]

Interesting, all.
Thanks for your thoughts.

Moving on. . .

['Nectarine-]

quote:

---

'Nectarine--Not makin' sense, there. What you wrote seems to support the idea,not contradict it.

---

hmm you didnt read closely did you? =P

first:

if m of a photon = 0 then the sum of 10000's of photons is equally 0.

would matter be made up of light it would have a mass of zero - and that is not the case.

second:

matter is made up of energy.
light is only a extremely small part of ONE form of energy.
there are many more forms of energy particles that move slower than lightspeed.
(and thus have a mass > 0 )

---------
*Rachel*

[ May 31, 2001: Message edited by: 'Nectarine- ]

[SpiralEye]

'Nectarine--Nope, I didn't read it closely. Hmmm, photons have zero mass, eh? Positive on that? What defines mass?

[Akolyte]

So does this mean my flashlight is alive and going to heaven?

[ToastyKen]

To be accurate, photons have zero rest mass. The energy they have translates to another kind of mass, but I forget what it's called... at least, that's what I remember.. I may be wrong.

One interesting thing is that the rest mass of a particle gets exponentially increased as it approaches the speed of light.. It thus takes more and more energy to speed it up as it gets faster, because it's so massive at that point. If a particle were to ever reach the speed of light, it'd have infinite mass. This clearly makes no sense, so particles can never reach the speed of light.

Photos have no rest mass, so they can travel at the speed of light just fine and dandy. (You can also slow them down.)

[Bishop_Six]

*stares blankly*