Via email from Mike Hines:
If you think light experiments with one and two slit experiments are mind bending. Try infinite slits with an infinite number of screens.
Then, it is pointed out that just means empty space.
You might think, yeah, sure, all that fancy math may correctly model some things we didn’t understand. But that doesn’t mean the model still works if you make a bunch of changes. And it for certain doesn’t tell us how things really work. It’s just a way of getting the right answer to a difficult problem. The math must have fallen apart when crazy stuff emerges from taking things to an extreme. Right?
No. Not in this case. Watch all the way to the end of this video.
Reality is tough to understand. Really, really tough. Tough beyond your wildest imagination. The simple experiment shown is a demonstration of just how little our feeble brains understand reality on a day-to-day basis.
On the practical side… Does this mean there is a way to tap into fiber optic communications with near zero chance of detection? And, of course, open air laser connections are wide open even when there is no interception of the beam. Encryption would be the only thing blocking a listener.
And since light is just a high frequency electromagnetic wave… What about getting a signal out of the main beam from a directional radio signal? Sure, the amplitude will be small, but is it a way to get a signal boost in addition to what you see from the side lobes? Or, is that what the side lobes really are?
If you watched to the end, you probably noticed you could see the light emitted from the laser not only at the target spot, but broadcasting widely and brightly from the lens on the end of the laser. Thus completely invalidating the entire point of the experiment.
Gads, I hate obviously bad designs. This experiment could have easily been corrected with a bit of black construction paper and a piece of tape. It would have been even better if it had been conducted in a vacuum. To, you know, cut down on scattering due to air.
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I have a running feud with some idiot with a PhD who conducted several “experiments” he claims show the speed of light is infinite in the near field. He has a 30-60 kilovolt spark generator as a transmitter and a dumbbell capacitor as a receiver, placed about 5 feet apart. And then he positions his unshielded oscilloscope directly between them. And he “amazingly” shows signals arriving at the same time they are transmitted, or even before they were transmitted. Said signals bearing little to no relation to each other, oddly enough.
He refuses to understand the incredibly obvious flaw in his experimental setup. He’s had his ego wrapped up in this nonsense for three decades. I guess science really does advance one funeral at a time.
The near field is weird, especially when you learn about it in the context of, say, antenna design.
In the case of the spark-gap experiment you describe, I also have to wonder how repeatable the trigger system is (e.g. jitter), and given 5 feet separation, his scope needs to be capable of responding down to the sub-nanosecond timescale, or, call it a scope rated to at least GHz speeds. Those still aren’t cheap, and tend to be sensitive to RFI.
That’s not to say your acquaintance is wrong, by the way. But it does say the measurement he’s trying to make is hard, and the setup has to be demonstrably capable of accurately and repeatably making the measurements needed to prove, or disprove, his hypothesis
It really is amazing how much time we spend tracking down stuff like this in the lab, just to make sure we’re measuring what we think we are.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote quite an interesting book about math, art and music.
Math is a tool, a model of reality that we find useful to store and communicate ideas about that reality. Gödel showed that its inherently incomplete. Like the halting problem in computer science, it can not describe or solve everything.
Well, that certainly made me appreciate being in my own head. (And how small and comfy it truly is.)
And it’s truly nice to know that about every time we get it all worked out.
Something else pops up that leads down a whole new rabbit hole of questions.
I just wonder how long it’s going to take for science as a community to peer-review the fact that what they discover. Was already created by someone/thing and is in use. Already.
You can start an equation with a “0”. But without adding an action to it. A “1”, or multiple 1’s, if you will. It does nothing.
And that we can only measure what’s already been created and working. (Multiple 1’s.)
Once we discover that, we discover an eternity of learning.
Created by someone that loves us.
No matter how we “feel” about things at the time.