swansont

Yeash, the commutation relation being the uncertainty clicked for me a few minutes after I logged of, after thinking about it as photon states. (Nice to think about physics now and then, instead of budget and having to keep both eyes on a construction project)

But isn't that more a function of choosing one basis that's a superposition of another basis, for angular momentum states (since linear polarization is a itself a superposition of the two circular polarizations)? (Brain atrophy. Don't have my books handy to look it up, and QM was sooo long ago)

It's crap. That doesn't mean you're crazy, just ignorant. Fortunately that's relatively easy to cure if you're willing to approach the claims critically. Does it make sense, e.g. that the 9-11 terrorists would bother to hijack planes with box-cutters if they had a weapon that can cause earthquakes and set off volcanoes? And ooh, "electromagnetic waves." That's light.

It's not uncertainty, though, in the normal way that's used in QM. It's about using the proper basis to measure the polarization, which is, as Atheist points out, is basically a linear algebra issue.

Re-defining standards is a tremendous burden. You have to either have an easier time measuring it, or the realization of the standard has to be significantly more precise, in order to justify doing it. Arbitrarily changing the speed of light to a round number does neither. I think the desire for round numbers is akin to a foolish consistency, if you'll pardon the observation. If that's the only motivation it's an exceedingly bad one.

Relativity does not say "nothing can travel faster than light." The backward pulse does not violate causality; the information has already reached past where it is, as evidenced by the forward pulse that is further away.

Actually it does, but the boiling point is mainly due to the hydrogen bonds. The Casimir effect is also known as the van der Waals force, but in this context it has little or nothing to do with zero-point energy.

A more apt analogy is using mgh for potential energy, and then using a huge number for h. The table is at 999999 meters, and the floor at 999998 meters. That's a lot of energy, but only 9.8 J/kg are available to you. h isn't the important value. [math]\Delta h[/math] is.

Isn't that what your sphincter is?

And what connection are you making with the Casimir force and hydrogen/deuterium?

We used "poof," and then pair production was "foop."

The mass is converted into other forms, be it other particles with some kinetic energy, or very often, photons (two, minimum, to conserve momentum). No hole. You might want to avail yourself of the "search" function.

"Speculations" is the place to challenge it, not here.

You'd need to know the area over which the light will spread. For a point source it's easy, since it's a 1/r2 dependence, but for your 20° angle, you'd need to know something about the intensity dostribution within that angle. However, if you are far away from the grid, so that it's approximately a point source ("far" meaning several times the 9 cm size of the grid) it should look a lot like a single LED with the total power of all of them, spread over the 20° angle.

You should feel smarter now, shouldn't you?