swansont

But in science and engineering we take the step of quantifying things. The spread in index of refraction(the dispersion) is small - perhaps a percent or two over the range of frequencies in question. Not the 10 orders of magnitude required for the heat propagation time to match the light propagation time. (which is essentially zero variation on this scale) And any case will have an area. Or you can just do it on a “per unit area” basis. The point being that this is a simple mathematical manipulation that should be well within the capability of an electrical engineer. No, I’m referring to Newton’s law of cooling, since we’re discussing that topic. The law that says Q depends on the temperature difference for conduction and convection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_cooling

I would not be at all surprised to find that the ability to metabolize food is not uniform in all people (because what is?), and might be worse when you’re sick. Calories are an energy content, but the ability to access and exploit that energy varies.e.g. your gut biome might not break certain foods down as efficiently as someone else’s, or the bacteria might feast on it more before the nutrients can be utilized. I’m sure there are a lot more possibilities that someone more familiar with biology could point to. A lot of moving parts here. I think the basics apply to the average person, and you have to acknowledge the variation in individuals. The concept of energy conservation is not endangered.

energy per unit time per unit area. So you multiply both sides by the area, and you have an equation for power: energy per unit time, just as I said. I said you might have to do a little algebraic manipulation, but I didn’t think that would be a barrier.

Nope S-B gives radiated power, which is a rate of energy transfer, i.e. energy per unit time. Newton’s law gives the heat transfer rate, which is also energy per unit time They are different, since they apply to different mechanisms, but they have the same units (when appropriately stated; you might have to do a little algebraic rearrangement, depending on how the formula is written)

So you concur. Is it actually the case that e.g. polyethylene, which is transparent in the IR, with an index of about 1.5, conducts heat at this speed? Or various glasses that works in that range, such as “Zinc Selenide (ZnSe), Zinc Sulfide (ZnS), Calcium Fluoride (CaF2) and Magnesium Fluoride (MgF2). All of these operate from the visible spectrum up to 8-10μ” https://www.emf-corp.com/optical-materials/optical-material-infrared-optics/ According the chart, the two zinc options operate out to 14 microns.

The dispersion effect in a prism is quite small. So basically you are predicting that any material that is transparent in the IR will have almost instantaneous heat flow through it. A material with an IR index of refraction of 1.5, IR light will travel at 2/3 c so heat will conduct at 2/3 c. Is that correct?

! Moderator Note Is there something you wish to discuss? This is not a platform for posting press releases

You’re ignoring all the coal and oil that was created in the past from dead plants and animals, and stored over the course of millions of years. But that energy is but a fraction of what we get from the sun. Global warming is an issue of trapping too much of that energy.

But for your idea to be true, this must hold for all materials. There are materials that are transparent in the IR. But the time delay has to be the same for all photons of the same energy, because the photons are identical, regardless of how they are generated

I think we’ve established that it will not.

AI doesn’t fact check. It will make up stuff, including citations, that sound legit.

Another bogus cite 212 issue 1-2 is from October of 2017, and the article doesn’t match what’s listed.

Yes, it is suspiciously like chatbot behavior, and I’d like the OP to explain.

1. The time is massively different. There are only so many atoms with which they can interact. 2. How do the atoms know which of these identical photons to interact with? Not interacting with light from a laser, that passes through at 2/3 c, but interacting with thermal radiation, which you claim goes much, much slower? For a small block of material the light might take 0.1 nanosecond (2 cm of travel) but the heat transfer takes perhaps a second? What is the physics that differentiates these two cases? Not some fairy tale, which is not science. Where’s the science?

Is this a view from your extensive experience in atomic physics? Absorption followed by de-excitation in a dipole pattern is the normal process in an electric dipole transition. With no explanation as to why this should magically be unobservable. This is your assertion. To conclude this is circular logic. But you said this time delay is responsible for the delay in heat transmission through the material. Why can light that isn’t heat travel through the material at 2/3 c, while the heat transmission delay - which you say is due to light - is much, much longer?

I can’t find either of these references. The page numbers don’t match the issue number for the first, with no search engine hits for the title for either (other than this post), and the second stopped publishing in 2017.

So if you had a lot of F you’d tend to form HFCs, rather than the F largely replacing H and giving you fluorocarbons

That’s the process - see if you can poke holes in an idea. Falsifiability is a key component of science. And I’m telling you it’s a rare occurrence. The photon gan go in many directions, and you require a specific one, over and over again. If they can’t be observed how can they be responsible for heat transfer? Isn’t heating something up an observable process? There’s no evidence it works this way, since the evidence we have says it doesn’t. Wishing does not make it so. Yo predicted a time for heat transfer, which depends on this speed. Why does the light for heat transfer behave differently than other light? (without resorting to magic or special pleading, please)

Is the C-F bond stronger than the C-H bond? That, at least, would give a preference for fluorocarbon

As I suspected. So fluorocarbon-based life would be more about having a lot more fluorine around than a lack of carbon.

Energy and momentum will be conserved regardless of the direction the photon is emitted. The difference is whether any energy and momentum is imparted to the atom. Your proposed mechanism is not observed to happen. i.e. your prediction fails. And since the photons can be emitted in other directions, this happens only rarely. You did more than that. You predicted a speed. Does thermal conduction happen at the speed that your idea predicts?

Don’t fluorocarbons still require a fair amount of carbon?

The emission is not preferential in that direction. The atom doesn’t “remember” the direction a photon came from. It’s simply in an excited state, and the subsequent emission probability is symmetric. It’s just as likely to emit in the direction the photon came from as in the opposite direction. How does an atom “know” the difference between these photons? We can measure how long it takes for light to pass through various materials. Polyethylene, for example, has an index of refraction of around 1.5 for infrared light. So light goes at around 2/3 c through it.

My PhD dissertation was based on laser cooling and trapping and I did projects based in it for 30 years. Your summary misses the point. Cooling happens on moving atoms (because the hot atoms are moving) but the photon absorption interaction is not dependent on that. “for me” isn’t how science works. If you don’t have experimental evidence for a notion, it’s worthless. Then derive this relationship. Physics is based on models.

No. Laser cooling (Nobel prize 1997) wouldn’t work if the photon was emitted in the same direction, since no net momentum would be imparted to the atom. But that’s not what happens. The emission is symmetric and not preferential, so momentum is imparted to the atom. (And depending on the specifics, could heat or cool the atoms. Cooling is usually more experimentally useful) The momentum would be imparted regardless of separation distance. This wouldn’t seem to explain the T vs T^4 difference we observe for conduction vs radiation.