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Originally Posted by Ken G
They could be anything, of course, but our understanding of them that works very well is that they have no mass, in the sense of rest mass. They do not need to have mass to be a particle, as mass, like energy, is simply an attribute, not a thing in and of itself.
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i just quoted that one paragraph from Ken G's post, but the reply is going to be to the whole thread and everyone that posted
Ok, so if both mass and energy are attributes, and high enough enery can produce mass, then mass and energy are the same thing, just mass is A LOT more energ than just energy? Just like we call a pond and an ocean..they are both water, one is just A LOT more water...is this correct?
If the above is correct then....With enough energy could we theoretically make things like iron, hydrogen or other elements?...Because if quarks are the basic building blocks of matter, and high energy photons produce electron/positron pairs, I dont see how matter as WE know it can be created...Also if matter and energy are the same thing it seems incredible to me that matter is so stable, whats holding all of that energy together?
How would a photon have more or less energy? what does that depend on?
If photons have two distinct polarization states, then they are physical particles right? Just to clear up, what i mean by physical is this...Its physical if we "zoom in" enough then there would be "something" there...I know there is nothing that we can use to "see" photons individually, but in a hypothetical situation, if we stopped all motion(including photons) and IF we had MUCH smaller particles to bombard the photon with, we would "see" this photon...similar how we use photons to see everything else (hypothetically speaking, of course)...THIS is what i mean by physical particles, or that they "exist", and that its not just a concept to help us understand what it REALLY is. I hope i made sence describing what i meant by physical.
Otherwise, its very confusing to me that photons are "nothing" in 3d space, but they have these attributes like energy, spin, and so on. How could this be? Also if photons "have" energy, then matter "has" energy, and if energy is "nothing" then matter is techically "nothing" aswell right? Would this mean that matter also has no volume, just "fields", which have volume, and we
perceive as matter?
If these photons from the big bang were
destroyed, then where did the energy go? even if they were replaced, how is that conservation of energy if they got destroyed?
I understand the wave function (well sort of), but that still isnt what i asked.
What i meant is the actual path of a photon. In textbooks the photon has a wavelength(in nanometers), with a peak and a trough...is this the case in reality, do photons fly through space in squigly lines or its just a straight line? Maybe i got somehting wrong again?
Whew..i think thats it for now
