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Originally Posted by lyndonashmore
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Originally Posted by A Thousand Pardons
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Originally Posted by lyndonashmore
when photons of light are absorbed and re-emitted as the pass through glass? ie what name do you give to this interaction which certainly takes place.
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If individual photons were absorbed and re-emitted, glass would not be transparent to them. |
Not true, this is exactly how photons travel through a piece of glass.
Try these.
French (French.A.P. 1968a Special relativity (p128. Nelson. London)) states “the propagation of light through a medium (even a transparent one) involves a continual process of absorption of the incident light and its reemission as secondary radiation by the medium.” |
By the "medium", which is made of
atoms.
These atoms interact with the photons as electric dipoles.
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Originally Posted by lyndonashmore
Feynman (Feynman.R.”Q.E.D.- the strange story of light and matter”.P76.
Penguin.London.1990.) describes the transmission of light through a transparent medium simply as “photons do nothing but go from one electron to another, and reflection and transmission are really the result of an electron picking up a photon, ”scratching its head”, so to speak, and emitting a new photon.”
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The usual quote, taken out of context from a book of popularized physics, where you forget to explain that this electron is
bound to a nucleus.
Electronic transitions in atoms are always described as the electron changing state:
"electron picking up a photon": electron changes to a state at higher energy;
"scratching its head": electron spends some time in the higher energy state (ever heard of fluorescence and phosphorescence?);
"emitting a new photon": electron goes back to the initial state.
Quantum Mechanics 101: apparently you still do not understand that the (quantized) electronic states that allow for this absorption-emission of photons, occur when the electron is bound to a nucleus.
This is not the case for the electrons in a plasma.
The quote, as you present it, is misleading.