What propels us (massful objects) forward in time?
No force is responsible for either of those phenomena. Massful objects move through time at about the speed of causality (c) and massless objects move through space at about the speed of causality (c). They move through the rest of spacetime at about 0.
There are a few different fundamental forces. These are the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. In quantum mechanics, each of these forces are mediated by a force carrier, called a boson. These force carriers are what cause the forces to act, or what carries that force from one object to another, causing them to exchange energy. You can think of them like a currency, or unit of energy associated with that force. For the electromagnetic force, the force carriers are photons. Photons are what are exchanged when two bodies interact via the electromagnetic force. They move at the speed at which that force moves, essentially the speed of causation. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about propulsion of photons because propulsion implies a force is acting on photons to propel them. However, photons carry the force. They can’t be acted on by forces. That’s why photons don’t interact with each other.
I dont know if you’ve gotten a satisfactory answer so far, as i don’t know your requirements and i havent read the entire thread – but I used to teach antenna theory and radio frequency theory to 18-20 year old Marines with no college experience and varying high school aptitude.
Light is a ripple. The thing that propels a ripple forward is just the fact that the water in front of the ripple is attached to the water that’s already rippling. The water in front MUST react.
The water here is the electromagnetic field – and all the electromagnetic field is, is the general ability of space to undergo change when there’s electricity or magnetism present. When one point of space has more electromagnetic energy than the next, well just like the next point of water has to take on or give water to accomodate a ripple, so too does the electromagnetic field in terms of charge.
What your eyes are sensitive to is the rapid change in electrogmagnetic potential (charge), which is not much different from a sensor measuring a water line, and seeing the water go up and down and up and down and up and down across it, and literally assigning a color to it based on how often it goes up and down.
The speed of light is just the speed at which one place can take on or give away electromagnetic potential from or to the next place, and that limit, the “why”, is likely tied to something like “the sum total of energy in the universe”.
If that helps, im glad, if not and you feel like it, ask for clarification. Ill be happy to go down a rabbit hole here.
If you know a bit about how fields work it’s not too bad to explain. Any charge will have an electric field around it. If that charge accelerates (most of the time we’ll have charges oscillating back and forth), as the particle moves the field moves along with it. But this “update” to the field is not instantaneous, it propagates through the field at the speed of light.
When you pluck a guitar string, one piece of string reacts to the neighbor piece of string moving. The speed with which it reacts depends on how tight the string is.
When you move a charge, the speed with which another charge reacts depends on how tight the connection between them is. The tightness in the connection turns out to be how much a magnetic field changes in space when an electric field changes in time.
When an entity changes from a high state of energy to a lower state of energy, the energy dissipation may take the form of light. Think of heat (infrared light) emanating from a hot coffee when placed in a cold room. So, the driving force of light is energy. Now defining energy in a more fundamental way is beyond me.
This is probably a dumb question, but let’s say you could transform any particle into a photon… it would immediately begin moving at c, right? What direction would it be moving? In the same direction it was already moving?
What if you did this to a particle that was standing still?
The energy that light travels with is from an electron moving from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. That process releases a photon. After this, single photons are lossless and do not need to be “propelled.”
Something as simple as two charged particles trying to collide, then repelling away from eachother sends a wave across space and your eye is tuned to pick up repeating signals at specific frequencies
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It takes force to accelerate things. Light is never accelerated. It always travels at ‘c’.
What propels us (massful objects) forward in time?
No force is responsible for either of those phenomena. Massful objects move through time at about the speed of causality (c) and massless objects move through space at about the speed of causality (c). They move through the rest of spacetime at about 0.
There are a few different fundamental forces. These are the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. In quantum mechanics, each of these forces are mediated by a force carrier, called a boson. These force carriers are what cause the forces to act, or what carries that force from one object to another, causing them to exchange energy. You can think of them like a currency, or unit of energy associated with that force. For the electromagnetic force, the force carriers are photons. Photons are what are exchanged when two bodies interact via the electromagnetic force. They move at the speed at which that force moves, essentially the speed of causation. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about propulsion of photons because propulsion implies a force is acting on photons to propel them. However, photons carry the force. They can’t be acted on by forces. That’s why photons don’t interact with each other.
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I dont know if you’ve gotten a satisfactory answer so far, as i don’t know your requirements and i havent read the entire thread – but I used to teach antenna theory and radio frequency theory to 18-20 year old Marines with no college experience and varying high school aptitude.
Light is a ripple. The thing that propels a ripple forward is just the fact that the water in front of the ripple is attached to the water that’s already rippling. The water in front MUST react.
The water here is the electromagnetic field – and all the electromagnetic field is, is the general ability of space to undergo change when there’s electricity or magnetism present. When one point of space has more electromagnetic energy than the next, well just like the next point of water has to take on or give water to accomodate a ripple, so too does the electromagnetic field in terms of charge.
What your eyes are sensitive to is the rapid change in electrogmagnetic potential (charge), which is not much different from a sensor measuring a water line, and seeing the water go up and down and up and down and up and down across it, and literally assigning a color to it based on how often it goes up and down.
The speed of light is just the speed at which one place can take on or give away electromagnetic potential from or to the next place, and that limit, the “why”, is likely tied to something like “the sum total of energy in the universe”.
If that helps, im glad, if not and you feel like it, ask for clarification. Ill be happy to go down a rabbit hole here.
If you know a bit about how fields work it’s not too bad to explain. Any charge will have an electric field around it. If that charge accelerates (most of the time we’ll have charges oscillating back and forth), as the particle moves the field moves along with it. But this “update” to the field is not instantaneous, it propagates through the field at the speed of light.
This “ripple” is light
When you pluck a guitar string, one piece of string reacts to the neighbor piece of string moving. The speed with which it reacts depends on how tight the string is.
When you move a charge, the speed with which another charge reacts depends on how tight the connection between them is. The tightness in the connection turns out to be how much a magnetic field changes in space when an electric field changes in time.
When an entity changes from a high state of energy to a lower state of energy, the energy dissipation may take the form of light. Think of heat (infrared light) emanating from a hot coffee when placed in a cold room. So, the driving force of light is energy. Now defining energy in a more fundamental way is beyond me.
This is probably a dumb question, but let’s say you could transform any particle into a photon… it would immediately begin moving at c, right? What direction would it be moving? In the same direction it was already moving?
What if you did this to a particle that was standing still?
The energy that light travels with is from an electron moving from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. That process releases a photon. After this, single photons are lossless and do not need to be “propelled.”
Changing magnetic fields
Something as simple as two charged particles trying to collide, then repelling away from eachother sends a wave across space and your eye is tuned to pick up repeating signals at specific frequencies