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Originally Posted by afterburner
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?
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I wouldn't describe it that way. Perhaps a better analogy would be water and ice, where the two are different forms of the same thing. That's still just an analogy, though. I absolutely agree with Ken G that energy and mass are properties, not things in and of themselves.
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Originally Posted by afterburner
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?
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Sure. High energy photons can produce any particle/antiparticle pairs. It's just that to produce, say, a proton and antiproton, you need a
lot more energy than for an electron - positron pair, so we don't see that kind of reaction as often.
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Originally Posted by afterburner
How would a photon have more or less energy? what does that depend on?
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It depends on the amount of energy that was available in the interaction that produced the photon in the first place.
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Originally Posted by afterburner
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.
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Given that description of physical particles, I don't think that anything actually qualifies.
At the smallest scales, particles simply do not behave like miniscule billiard balls, they are quantum objects that behave in stranger ways.
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Originally Posted by afterburner
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?
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That's entirely possible, though it's by no means the only way it could be.
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Originally Posted by afterburner
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?
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The energy went into whatever interaction was involved in the absorption of the photon.
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Originally Posted by afterburner
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?
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I hope you won't think I'm being flip, but as long as you're thinking about the "actual path" of a photon, then you don't really understand the wave function.
As Ken G pointed out, a photon doesn't really have a classical path. However, if we're in one of the situations where we can use such a classical path to describe a photon, then it's definitely not a "wiggly line". The oscillations shown in illustrations are oscillations of the electric and magnetic fields, not the physical position of the photon.