Submitted by TheGandPTurtle t3_111g7s9 in askscience
boxdude t1_j8gmxjg wrote
The physics of light slowing through a medium is well explained by Feynman in this lecture:
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_31.html
It is a result of moving charges in the material and its effect on the field.
The photon absorption and re-emission model doesn't hold up as well as Feynman's explanation.
gr7ace t1_j8hil80 wrote
Such a good physicist, critical thinker and author. Feynman books are an amazing read.
leftoutoctopus t1_j8hn1ed wrote
This block of text felt too complex for a leyman like me to fully understand it as I read through, is there a "for idiots" version of it?
common_sensei t1_j8hpj47 wrote
I like this Fermilab video for explaining light slowing in a medium: https://youtu.be/CUjt36SD3h8
You can think of it as a wave moving through water with a bunch of ping pong balls. As the wave lifts and drops the ping pong balls they resist the acceleration, and that makes a little inverse ripple within the bigger wave. The big wave and the little ripples stack together into a slower wave, but the energy doesn't change, so once the wave moves past the ping pong balls it goes back to the same speed and height.
leftoutoctopus t1_j8hvp8a wrote
Incredible video, but I still don't understand how does a wave not loses energy as it passes through mediums, or the energy it loses is negligible since it has so little? What happens? I've understood something and now I understand even less.
KillerCodeMonky t1_j8hzclh wrote
A wave doesn't contain energy, it is energy. And it would only lose that energy by doing work, same as anything else. So what work do you think it is doing when it passes through a medium?
Stillcant t1_j8i24m2 wrote
Well the person above said the wave is resisted by the medium, and the wave moves the medium (the ping pong balls) as it passes. That sounds like work in the analogy used at least.
And could a photon not shift to a lower energy wavelength? Different photons have different energy I thought?
KillerCodeMonky t1_j8i455z wrote
Here on earth, a ball resists being lifted due to gravity. It also returns all that energy when it's dropped again.
A wave that lifts a bunch of ping pong balls on it's leading edge, then drops them on it's trailing edge where the energy is returned to the wave, has done net zero work.
Stillcant t1_j8i4hvj wrote
Beautiful, thank you
grahampositive t1_j8ici68 wrote
This is where the analogy breaks down though. A water wave lifting a ping pong ball and returning it to it's initial position has lost energy. The ping pong ball pushes against air as it moves upwards, and the resulting ball-air collisions generate heat which is lost to entropy.
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KrombopulosThe2nd t1_j8i7auz wrote
Well here on earth, is it possible to lift anything with 100% efficiency? Shouldn't there be some loss of energy
KillerCodeMonky t1_j8ia5jn wrote
Yes of course these are not perfect processes. Otherwise an undersea earthquake would create a tsunami on all of its coastlines. Energy is lost or made non-coherent in a variety of imperfections, including heat and scattering. In the case of ocean waves, they are typically created and recharged by the wind as they move along.
I mostly wanted to make the point that a wave is not displacing its medium, but simply moving through it. A wave is nothing but water and energy. There's nothing there displacing the water to do work. The water moves around due to the energy, but in a way which is generally neutral in terms of work actually done. A wave hitting the shoreline really just transfers from moving through the water to moving through the land.
DamionFury t1_j8ijw6m wrote
Work can turn out to be one of the less intuitive aspects of physics. For example, magnetic fields cannot do any work because they act orthogonally to the direction of motion, yet it certainly looks like work when you use an electromagnet to lift an object and make it float. I wish I could remember the explanation my Electromagnetism professor gave me for what is actually doing the work in that scenario.
Parrek t1_j8j1x62 wrote
Usually the battery or another power source maintaining the magnetic field. Otherwise, the back current induced by the object being picked up would cancel everything out
DamionFury t1_j8j6cgr wrote
Ah yes. That's right. I also remember we talked about the case of permanent magnets and objects suspended above them. I don't remember what his answer was and I wouldn't be surprised if he told me to try to work it out for myself because my questions were holding the class up.
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agoodpapa t1_j8jpira wrote
Not sure. The ping pong balls have been moved and therefore have absorbed energy.
KillerCodeMonky t1_j8jr7mn wrote
Movement perpendicular to and away from the earth will convert to potential gravitational energy, which is then released when the ball moves back towards the earth.
In addition, you're assuming that the balls are passive participants. In actuality, from the waves perspective, they are actively resisting being lifted, and actively attempting to fall, limited by their buoyancy in the water. When the wave causes the water to fall away from the balls, they are falling into the water on that trailing edge.
Finally, conservation of energy dictates that that energy does not just disappear. If the energy goes into the ball as movement, something has to stop that movement. That something is going to be either gravity if moving up, or the water itself in any other direction. So the energy is moving from the water, into the ball, back into the water as it resists the ball displacing it to move.
Monadnok t1_j8ij84r wrote
Someone below pointed out the gravity analogy. Another is a spring, where an object can do work on the spring, and then the spring can return the energy by doing work on the object.
As Feynmann's lecture points out, the electrons that are worked by the applied electric field of the photon can be considered to be "fastened" to the atoms of the materials by a "spring". So the incoming photon moves the electron against a "spring", and the spring returns the energy by working on the electron, which produces a new oscillating electric field to add to the field of the incoming photon.
Dirty_Virmling t1_j8inomo wrote
Worth pointing out that electromagnetic waves do lose energy when traveling through naturally occurring materials.
SemiDirectInsult t1_j8mqdsc wrote
How else would radiation raise the temperature of objects? Unless I’m fundamentally misunderstanding something, that’s energy transmission.
leftoutoctopus t1_j8i04ax wrote
Well, passing through it. I mean, is anything really "free"? Changing the energy from one form (wave) to another doesn't "spend" part of itself?
KillerCodeMonky t1_j8i2a4l wrote
Well, let's look at a wave in water. It moves some water around, but in a cyclical pattern that should result in very little actual work being done. The same way that lifting something gives you all the energy back when you drop it.
Maybe you're thinking of this from the perspective of a solid object moving through a medium, where it must spend energy on displacing the medium in order to move? This is where my note regarding the wave being energy is important. It does not have to displace anything to move through the medium, the same way that the heat from your stove doesn't displace your pan in order to heat your food. The energy simply goes through.
leftoutoctopus t1_j8i2ugt wrote
Thank you! I got it now!
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sparant76 t1_j8it3gb wrote
Heating it up?
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DuskyDay t1_j8iio35 wrote
This can't be understood without math.
The wave doesn't lose energy as long as the crystal lattice is perfect, because the physics of our universe allows it to spread in a special way. (The photons don't interact with the particles the medium is made of.)
skyler_on_the_moon t1_j8iwbez wrote
I watched that whole video to see the ping pong ball experiment and am now disappointed.
common_sensei t1_j8j1l8a wrote
Try it yourself!... although it probably won't work as described.
The wave would mostly regain the speed after the ping pong ball area, but it would be much reduced in height. A lot of energy would be lost to ripples going everywhere. My analogy just serves to illustrate the general concept of particles reacting to the approach and passing of the wave and generating interfering waves of their own.
However, a similar effect can be seen in wave tanks when you change the depth of the water: https://youtu.be/4_VejGC0DMM?t=261
In this case the interfering waves are bouncing from the new lower bottom of the tank, slowing down the wave.
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TruthOrFacts t1_j8i3b2i wrote
I don't see how this explanation is internally consistent. It is a behavior we see in other types of waves, but in those other cases the wave only appears to slow, and the actual wave proceeds at full speed.
bandti45 t1_j8ia88q wrote
One thing to remember with photons is that while speed is consistent, intensity isn't.
RailRuler t1_j8ixshe wrote
Intensity is a measurement of the number of photons arriving times the energy of each photo. The question is asking about a single photon, which is actually meaningful to speak of. Are you saying that the single photon's energy (wavelength/frequency) is changing?
bandti45 t1_j8jc812 wrote
Well, the person I was replying to was talking about light in general, not a single photon. This is something I only have basic knowledge about.
Interactions with stuff does change it in one way or another. The way the sky is blue is light interacting with air, and tinted glass changes the light going through it. I don't know the mechanics, but that's a change in the photons without changing total speed.
RailRuler t1_j9kjypo wrote
Those are both the medium filtering out certain colors of light, reducing its intensity. It doesn't change the photons.
The only thing that changes photons is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence
bandti45 t1_j9l737f wrote
I feel like I should have gotten this concept a while ago... thank you for informing me.
AdiSoldier245 t1_j8hue8s wrote
Honestly it's pretty abstract even if you know what's going on. Just think of it like light causing other waves that look mixed with light making it all muddled up and looking slower.
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DBNodurf t1_j8ifbxe wrote
Leyman: since ley is the Spanish word for law, is a leyman a lawman?
shouldbebabysitting t1_j8jkzcj wrote
Feynman's book QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is written without math. I highly recommend it if you want to understand light.
ImpatientProf t1_j8hzdda wrote
Accelerating the charges in the material requires absorbing some energy from the light. Emission from the charges (the radiation field) requires depositing some energy back into the light. This is consistent with the photon absorption and re-emission model. Sure, it's not individual photons being absorbed by individual charges, but it's still an exchange of energy and the light is still quantized.
MasterPatricko t1_j8icx22 wrote
> Sure, it's not individual photons being absorbed by individual charges,
You are correct overall but dismissing this specific point as if most people understand it easily is pedagogically dangerous -- based on my teaching experience that's exactly what a lot of people who hear "photon absorption and emission" end up thinking of.
back_seat_dog t1_j8itvdf wrote
Exactly. I think people forget that the way the other interpret what you say is very important. Even if you are 100% correct, your wording can lead others to think something that is completely wrong. People aren't robots absorbing all information as it is, they interpret and change that information to align with preconceived notions and to make it easy to digest, and this can lead to misunderstanding.
The explanation is also problematic because this "absorption and emission" happens instantaneously, it doesn't absorb some energy, wait for a while, and release the energy. The release isn't isotropic either.
At the end of the day, it might be technically correct to say it is an absorption and re-emission, but it does more harm than good and doesn't really help clarify what is happening.
boxdude t1_j8i7en7 wrote
I work in optical engineering and am not an expert scientist in the nature of light. Our professional society SPIE held conferences (titled nature of light: what is a ohoton) over the last several years ( i believe there were 7 sessions over 7 years) where the experts argued out the nature of light and there is still disagreement amongst them on what a photon is and whether it exists.
Meanwhile, solving electromagnetic field components in the presence of optical components similar to Feynmans approach, whether it be a simple lens or photonic integrated circuits, well models actual behavior in all practical cases encountered with modern optical devices that I am aware of. I haven't seen any benefit to switching to a photon emission based model, especially when the experts cant even agree on the fundamental nature of the photon.
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_AlreadyTaken_ t1_j8ijqm7 wrote
If it induces the charged particles to move due to its field then those moving charged particles will also produce em waves.
shouldbebabysitting t1_j8jkls1 wrote
>The photon absorption and re-emission model doesn't hold up as well as Feynman's explanation.
In his book QED, Feynman explained that he favored the photon absorption model but used field mathematics because it was the only method to deal with the vast quantities of photons.
"I want to emphasize that light comes in this form-particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave- like particles."
-Feynman, "QED The Strange Theory of light and Matter"
He then went on to explain everything about transmission, refraction and reflection as individual photon absorption and emissions.
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Leemour t1_j90ykbm wrote
Your explanation isn't relevant to the OP. You're using classical explanations, while OP asked how the photon behaves (i.e asked for the quantum model).
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