What are Virtual Photons

[Tom Mattson]

X knows Y.

 

He was interested in binary relations of that form. I didn't go too deep into his work' date=' but epistemology (how do you know?) does take one beyond truth table analysis to actual knowing of something you didn't know previously, by using the process of deduction correctly.

[/quote']

 

But there is by no means a consensus on the "correct" analysis of knowledge, or even if there is one. There traditional analysis of knowledge is:

 

P knows that q, iff:

1. P believes q.

2. P is justfied in believing q.

3. q is true.

 

But there are well-known counterexamples to this. Using this analysis, there is no way to have the certainty of deductive validity, because the analysis itself was not deduced. It was postulated.

[Johnny5]

 

1. You claim to have knowledge that determinism is inherent in our universe.

2. You claim that determinism is "deducible" and that "i (Johnny5) extended the kolmogorov axioms to statements and then operationally defined the binary relation 'before' on the set of moments in time."

 

Pretty much mmm hmm yep.

[Johnny5]

But there is by no means a consensus on the "correct" analysis of knowledge' date=' or even if there is one. There traditional analysis of knowledge is:

 

[i']P knows that q, iff:

1. P believes q.

2. P is justfied in believing q.

3. q is true.[/i]

 

 

Doesn't matter if there is concensus or not.

 

Let me have a look at 1,2,3 above...

 

Ok that is all wrong, you introduced the binary relation 'believe'

 

X believes Y

 

Hintikka did that, I DO NOT EVER do that.

 

I was only interested in statements of the form X knows Y, where X is a reasoning agent, and Y is a statement.

[Tom Mattson]

By the extension of the Kolmogorov axioms to statements (instead of events) it follows that each of the probabilities above must either be equal to zero' date=' or equal to one,

[/quote']

 

You aren't extending the Kolmogorov axioms, you are actually restricting them to a special case, namely that in which the Kolmogorov weights are no longer continuous variables. You assume this a priori, I might add.

 

from which it follows that one and only one of them is equal to 1, and the rest are equal to zero, which means that there cannot be six possible next moments in time. There can only be one.

 

QED

 

But you haven't even laid a single glove on undeterminism with this argument. Undeterminism states that it is not possible to predict which of the Y_i will emerge in a given experimental situation, and you have not provided any argument to suggest otherwise.

[Tom Mattson]

X believes Y

 

Hintikka did that' date=' I DO NOT EVER do that.

[/quote']

 

I know you didn't do it, because you didn't do anything with it. At no point did you ever say what it means for X to know Y.

[Newtonian]

This started off in another thread' date=' but was inappropriate there, so I will post it here.

 

The question began from considering that the inertial mass of an object is due to some electromagnetic interaction of the object with the quantum vacuum. Haish, Rueda, Puthoff ZPF Theory

 

So the question is, what is a virtual photon?

 

The question originated from a paper with this in the abstract:

 

[i']Two Scientists Alfonso Rueda and Bernard Haisch have worked on a paper titled; Gravity and The Quantum Vacuum Inertia Hypothesis, where they suggest that virtual photons, there as a result of Heisenberg’s, uncertainty principle, are turned into real particles by an accelerating object. The pressure caused by the particles hitting the object (and the resonance) causes inertia. [/i]

At the end of the day.Its clap trap.

And no more relevent than giant green jelly beans.It seems very sad and negates decades of scientific breakthroughs,to make correct an invalid calculation by incorperating VIRTUAL anythings.It is like saying our calculations show 2+1 is four because we add a virtual 1.

If our understanding of photons is primative we cannot just make up nonsense to arrive at a correct formula..

Before anyone picks me up on my opinion,if something does not stand up to the scientific method its invalid!

Nobody can prove virtual photons exist,indeed its a perculiar way of giving logic to the totally illogical

[Tom Mattson]

If our understanding of photons is primative we cannot just make up nonsense to arrive at a correct formula..

 

You evidently do not know how virtual photons emerge from QED.

 

Before anyone picks me up on my opinion' date='if something does not stand up to the scientific method its invalid!

[/quote']

 

But the thing is, they do stand up to the scientific method. QED is falsifiable, and it leads to predictions which are accurate to more than 10 decimal places.

[Newtonian]

The thing is they DO NOT stand up to the scientific method.They can be calculated for!! which is not the same thing as actually existing.One might as well say that instead of virtual photons what we actually calculate are virtual giant green jelly beans!

Please predictions are not empirical proof so dont go there

[Tom Mattson]

The thing is they DO NOT stand up to the scientific method.They can be calculated for!! which is not the same thing as actually existing.

 

It is clear that you are not up to date on what the scientific method is. I just made some long posts about this in the philosophy section' date=' which I don't care to retype:

 

On the Problem of Demarcation:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=10958&postcount=6

 

On Confirmation vs. Falsification, and Deduction vs. Induction:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=140257&postcount=10

 

By any measure, QED stands up to the scientific method.

 

One might as well say that instead of virtual photons what we actually calculate are virtual giant green jelly beans.

 

No, because virtual photons have the right properties to match observational results. You can't just subsitute any old thing in for them.

 

Please predictions are not empirical proof so dont go there

 

Of course predictions are not empirical proof. Confirmatory evidence of predictions^* is empirical proof, and QED has it in spades.

 

edit to add footnote:

^*That is, confirmatory evidence that is obtained in an attempt to disprove a falsifiable theory is empirical proof. Of course, it makes no sense to speak of empirical proof of something that is analytically true.

[J.C.MacSwell]

Any statement is either true or false' date=' and no statement is true and false simultaneously.

 

.[/quote']

 

This statement is false.

[Johnny5]

 

Originally Posted by Johnny5

Any statement is either true or false' date=' and no statement is true and false simultaneously.[/quote']

 

 

 

This statement is false.

 

Impossible, that statement is the entire basis of first order temporal binary logic.

 

Binary, meaning that there are exactly two truth values.

Temporal meaning that some statements can have a truth value which can vary in time, though the meaning of any statement is constant in time.

First order, in the sense that the universal and existential quantifiers are part of the language.

 

An example of a statement whose truth value can vary in time is:

 

I am hungry.

[Tom Mattson]

I think that JC is talking about self-referential statements.

[Johnny5]

You aren't extending the Kolmogorov axioms' date=' you are actually [i']restricting[/i] them to a special case, namely that in which the Kolmogorov weights are no longer continuous variables. You assume this a priori, I might add.

 

restricting... extending you saw what i did.

 

But you haven't even laid a single glove on undeterminism with this argument. Undeterminism states that it is not possible to predict which of the Y_i will emerge in a given experimental situation' date=' and you have not provided any argument to suggest otherwise.[/quote']

 

I wasn't interested in knowing about predictions about outcomes of specific experiments. Indeed, my inquiry really began the moment I wondered whether or not the Born interpretation of QM was correct, as I understood it at the time, which was many years ago.

 

Hydrogen atom 17283 has an electron in it at position (345,0,999934), in inertial reference frame S. How many possible locations in this frame are there for that electron to be at the next moment in time?

 

Is the answer one, or more than one? <---- that is the question I was interested in answering at the time.

 

The argument provided, leads to the conclusion that in any frame of reference, any given center of inertia at position (x,y,z) has only one possible place (x`,y`,z`) which it will be at the next moment in time.

[Johnny5]

I think that JC is talking about self-referential statements.

 

Self-referential statements... you have assumed his sentence referred to itself. Since he quoted me, I presumed he was referring to my sentence, which is my formulation of the basis of the logic I am using.

[J.C.MacSwell]

Self-referential statements... you have assumed his sentence referred to itself. Since he quoted me, I presumed he was referring to my sentence, which is my formulation of the basis of the logic I am using.

 

In my twisted sort of way I was doing both. I was claiming it was false and providing evidence.

[Johnny5]

In my twisted sort of way I was doing both. I was claiming it was false and providing evidence.

 

No no no, that sentence won't accomplish that.

 

Not all sentences are statements. Don't forget that.

 

The sentence "This sentence is false" may or may not be a statement, you don't know which a priori. If you try to treat it as a statement, you will get confused, but eventually you should reach the conclusion that it isn't a statement. Either that or get bored, whichever happens to come first.

[Tom Mattson]

I wasn't interested in knowing about predictions about outcomes of specific experiments. Indeed' date=' my inquiry really began the moment I wondered whether or not the Born interpretation of QM was correct, as I understood it at the time, which was many years ago.

[/quote']

 

I'm not talking about specific experiments, I'm talking about undeterminism. It basically says that there exist random physical states, not that there are multiple parallel futures. Your argument is not even against undeterminism. It is against one possible interpretation of it, and it's not even clear to me that that argument is sound.

 

The argument provided, leads to the conclusion that in any frame of reference, any given center of inertia at position (x,y,z) has only one possible place (x`,y`,z`) which it will be at the next moment in time.

 

That conclusion is perfectly compatible with undeterminism. In this interpretation, at any given moment, an electron has precisely one randomly decided location.

[Tom Mattson]

Self-referential statements... you have assumed his sentence referred to itself.

 

Yes' date=' but since it is a counterexample to your statement about statements not being true or false simultaneously, it was a good assumption on my part.

 

Since he quoted me, I presumed he was referring to my sentence, which is my formulation of the basis of the logic I am using.

 

I think he was killing two birds with one stone. Witty fellow, that JC.

[Johnny5]

That conclusion is perfectly compatible with undeterminism. In this interpretation' date=' at any given moment, an electron has precisely one randomly decided location.[/quote']

 

Oh I can use binary logic to wipe out this undeterminism nonsense. The argument which I showed you is valid, and sound. I have to go, we can talk about it more if you want. I insist the argument I gave is sound.

[Tom Mattson]

Oh I can use binary logic to wipe out this undeterminism nonsense.

 

No' date=' you can't. There is no way to use logic to establish contingent statements about the real world.

 

The argument which I showed you is valid, and sound. I have to go, we can talk about it more if you want. I insist the argument I gave is sound.

 

The argument you gave above is silly and irrelevant. You claim that you can derive a nontrivial fact about the world, without even once making reference to any observed facts about the world. Not surprisingly, you reached a conclusion that you can only know is true in your made-up universe, provided that no invalid inferences were made. I did not bother to check all the inferences because I already know that your argument cannot possibly accomplish your stated goal, for the reasons I already gave.

 

There are vastly superior arguments in favor of determinism already out there. I don't agree with them, but at least they all have the required ingredient of reference to the outside world.

[Severian]

It's the mediator of the EM interaction. But I think it would be a mistake to grant them a lofty ontological status' date=' in view of the fact that they correspond to a perturbation expansion in QED. Nature doesn't know about perturbation theory, and it may well be that virtual photons are simply an artifact of perturbation theory.

[/quote']

 

I would dispute this. I agree that the perturbation series itself is rather artificial and one can only really regard initial and final state fields are 'real'. The internal virtual particle are just a mechanism allowing us to calculate the matrix element. However, even without using perturbation theory one still needs a link from initial to final state and one can (in certain cases) define this as a photon. Momentum conservation dictates that this 'photon' is virtual.

 

I certainly don't think of virtual particles in terms of the HUP. In fact (as the previous paragraph suggests) I do not think that energy-momentum conservation is ever violated (in this context). The point here is that for an on-shell particle [math]m^2 = E^2-p^2[/math] (where p is the magnitude of the 3-momentum and I have set c=1) but for a virtual particle this no longer holds. One does not retrict the energy and momentum from the mass.

 

No, they don't, but the violations cannot be observed. The virtual particles don't live long enough.

 

In a way it is completely the other way round. Since the propogation of a particle is inversely proportional to the square of [math]E^2-p^2-m^2[/math] an on-shell particle has an infinite life-time (since [math]E^2-p^2-m^2=0[/math]). Therefore it is actually impossible to observe a 'real' on-shell particle because in observing it you end its life. Any particle which we observe has a finite lifetime and is therefore 'virtual'.

 

If you are unwilling to accept this, you still must accept that we have indirectly observed virtual particles in processes such as [math]e^+e^- \to Z^* \to \mu^+ \mu^-[/math]. This evidence is as direct as the evidence for quarks...

[swansont]

The thing is they DO NOT stand up to the scientific method.They can be calculated for!! which is not the same thing as actually existing.One might as well say that instead of virtual photons what we actually calculate are virtual giant green jelly beans!

Please predictions are not empirical proof so dont go there

 

You can call them jelly beans if you wish, but at a vertex in a Feynman diagram, they obey the rules of photon interactions.

 

Virtual photons don't have to be "real" but nature behaves as if they were.

[Johnny5]

Originally Posted by Johnny5

Any statement is either true or false, and no statement is true and false simultaneously.

 

This statement is false.

 

In my twisted sort of way I was doing both. I was claiming it was false and providing evidence.

 

No no no' date=' that sentence won't accomplish that.

 

Not all sentences are statements. Don't forget that.

 

 

Originally Posted by Johnny5

Self-referential statements... you have assumed his sentence referred to itself.

 

 

Yes' date=' but since it is a counterexample to your statement about statements not being true or false simultaneously, it was a good assumption on my part.

 

 

 

I think he was killing two birds with one stone. Witty fellow, that JC.[/quote']

 

Let S denote J.C.'s sentence, "This statement is false."

 

1. S is a statement. [open scope of first assumption]

2. S is true. [open scope of second assumption]

3. S is a statement AND S is false [Meaning of S]

4. S is false. [3; simplification axiom]

5. S is true and S is false. [2,4; conjunction axiom]

6. |S|=1 and |S|=0 [better symbolic representation of 5]

7. 1=0 [6; reflexive,symmetric, transitive properties of =]

8. not(1=0) [Axiom of binary logic]

9. (1=0) and not(1=0) [7,8; conjunction axiom]

10. If S is true then (1=0) and not(1=0); close scope of 2nd assumption.

11. not (S is true) [10; Reductio ad absurdum]

12. |S|=0 or |S|=1 [Axiom of binary logic]

13. not (|S|=1) [better symbolic representation of 11]

14. |S|=0 [12,13; Disjunctive syllogism]

15. S is false [Logically equivalent English translation of 14]

16. S is a statement and S is false. [1,15; conjunction]

17. S [16; meaning of S]

18. This sentence is false. [17; S=This sentence is false]

19. |S|=1 [18]

20. |S|=0 and |S|=1 [14,19; conjunction axiom]

21. 0=1 and not(0=1) [20]

22. If S is a statement then 0=1 and not(0=1) [close scope of only remaining assumption]

23. not (S is a statement) [22; RAA]

QED

 

The correct conclusion is that S isn't a statement, therefore it does not provide a counterexample, as JC suggested. The error that is made in the Liar's paradox, is that there is a hidden assumption, namely that the sentence is a statement. Some sentences are statements, but not all. Before you begin reasoning about the sentence, you have to assume it is a statement, so even if he had written, "This sentence is false," the assumption that the sentence is a statement still has to be made by the reasoning agent first.

 

The liar's paradox is fun though, and it does provide a reason to differentiate between sentences, and statements. This is the resolution to the liar's paradox that I use. Notice that the reasoning event terminates with the reasoner in an assumptionless state.

[Johnny5]

I know you didn't do it, because you didn't do anything with it. At no point did you ever say what it means[/b'] for X to know Y.

 

I can't specify what it means, that's impossible.

 

But the following is worth mentioning:

 

For any reasoning agent X, and any statement Y: If X knows Y then Y is true.

 

 

We can know things which aren't statements, but thats not the point of the above. The point is only that if someone really does know some statement, the truth value is objective.

[swansont]

"Any statement is either true or false, and no statement is true and false simultaneously." and "Not all sentences are statements" are asserted without proof.

 

The contradiction can also be that one or both of those two statements are false.

 

Basically, you've defined a statement to be something that must be either true or false, which is a subset of sentences. Your proof is a tautalogy.