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What Do You Think, Are Photons Matter Or Energy??


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Betas are electrons. Alphas are Helium nuclei.

 

thank god you here swansont, i was reading that post, about alpha is helium, and i was like what the, well, ok, i wont say what i thought [was a bit rude :D ]

 

moving on swiftly, or so they say.....

 

theoretically, couldnt photons be energy with matter... or is that the wrong sort of 'energy' because, like, a battery can have energy... a spring has potential energy, a wave has kinetic energy, they all have matter, so why cant a photon have a tiny amount of matter but yet still have energy? :cool:

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The definition seems quite vague.

I supose there can never be a clear distinction between matter and energy' date=' photons might just be what bridges the gap in between them.[/quote']

 

I agree with this... I'm not the most learned on this or any subject, but this makes sense to me.

 

Usually, light is given off when mass is converted to energy. So photons would be related to both.

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It depends:

Based on Relativity with the lightspeed as a limit' date=' pure energy.

Based on that lightspeed is not a limit, matter.[/quote']

 

Couldnt light speed still be the limit if photons just had the smallest ammount of mass out of every particle?

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E=mc2 is only true in a the rest frame of the particle. The photon has no rest frame.

 

The more general equation is [math] E^2 = m^2c^4+p^2c^2[/math]

In the rest frame, the momentum of the particle (p) is zero, so this returns to E=mc2

 

But, for light, m=0, so the equation becomes E=pc and thus the momentum is E/c

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Sure, protons have mass, one proton has the mass of 1,6748*10^-24g=1,008665u.

What is energy?

There are whole bunch of different types of energy,e.g. kinetic energy, warmth, light, electricity...

Most of it has to do with motion of electrons within a molecule or an atom, or just simple with the motion of Ions...

Protons are just involved, because they attract the electrons in an atom.

But Protons for themselfes are never energy, although they have a charge, 1,602*10^-19 C.

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Sure' date=' protons have mass, one proton has the mass of 1,6748*10^-24g=1,008665u.

What is energy?

There are whole bunch of different types of energy,e.g. kinetic energy, warmth, light, electricity...

Most of it has to do with motion of electrons within a molecule or an atom, or just simple with the motion of Ions...

Protons are just involved, because they attract the electrons in an atom.

But Protons for themselfes are never energy, although they have a charge, 1,602*10^-19 C.[/quote']

 

Sorry mate! But we're discussing pHotons here!

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Hey, it's not a big deal isn't it? All right, there is a difference between Photons and Protons ;) , but hey, it was an optic shortcut :D !

By the way: This women you mentioned, I visited some pages, she's terrible, please don't mention her with me in one sentence again!!

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my wife is studying a degree in oriental medicine and was posed the question

 

"what is energy?"

 

of course there are many philosophical answers to this but it seems that energy can't actually be defined, only expressed in relation to other things (as the theory of relativity does).

 

so i'm wondering, if people here had to give a concise answer to that question, what would it be?

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I know for a fact that photons are matter. If they were not matter than it would be impossible to detect them. Fields are the only non-mass "thing" that is detectable. Perhaps photons are pieces of mass that emit a field? Has that idea ever been looked into?

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Cant you have "real" and psuedo photons? the brief history of time talks about psuedo photons (cant be measured/detected) interacting with matter and a "real" photon is produced which can be detected

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I know for a fact that photons are matter. If they were not matter than it would be impossible to detect them. Fields are the only non-mass "thing" that is detectable. Perhaps photons are pieces of mass that emit a field? Has that idea ever been looked into?

 

Funny that, since I know for a fact that they are not. It seems that your definition of matter is anything that is possible to detect. This is a bad definition because then everything is matter - anything we cannot detect (in principle) by definition does not exist.

 

The usual definition of matter is the objects apon which the fundamental forces act but not the force carriers themselves (more technically, matter is a fundamental representation of the gauge group, while force carriers are in the adjoint representation). Since the photon is the force carrier of Electromagnetism, it is not matter.

 

Of course, this is just a definition, but it is pointless to define matter as a photon and then ask 'Is a photon matter?'.

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Cant you have "real" and psuedo photons? the brief history of time talks about psuedo photons (cant be measured/detected) interacting with matter and a "real" photon is produced which can be detected

 

These 'pseudo-photons' are more usual known as virtual photons. A 'real' particle obeys the relation E2 = m2c4+p2c2 (where for a photon m=0), but for a virtual particle this is violated. However, it is not allowed to be violated for very long, and the amount of time it is violated for is related to how much it is violated. So if it is violated a lot, the particle will have a very short lifetime. This is really the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in a different guise.

 

(Really, all particles are virtual. A 'real' particle for which the relation is exactly obeyed will live forever, but since the act of observing a particle detroys it we can only observe particles with a finite life-time and which are therefore virtual (at least by a very small amount).)

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my wife is studying a degree in oriental medicine and was posed the question

 

"what is energy?"

 

of course there are many philosophical answers to this but it seems that energy can't actually be defined' date=' only expressed in relation to other things (as the theory of relativity does).

 

so i'm wondering, if people here had to give a concise answer to that question, what would it be?[/quote']

 

I am a new member to this forum, and i have posted this many times on different threads, and I keep saying that I have developed a theory on the universal beginning and end. I define energy as a direct proportion with time. Matter is a direct proportion of space, seeing as how without space, matter can not exist, so without time, does that mean energy can not exist? I think without energy, it is the same as being without time. Without time, we would be frozen stiff, and the same would happen if we ran out of energy. So, to answer this, energy is a characteristic of matter to produce the space time continuum. In less scientific words, energy is a proportion of time. Not time itself, just a correlation of it. Because matter is not space itself, but a correlation of it. Hope you can use this

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