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Double-Slit Experiment in Time, Not Space
TheMatt writes "Thomas Young's double-slit experiment is a classic experiment that helped establish the wave-like nature of light. Since then, it has been done with atoms, buckyballs, and biomolecules. It has even been seen in a single molecule, and the single electron version was voted the most beautiful experiment by Physics World readers (covered previously on Slashdot). Now, PhysicsWeb is reporting that Gerhard Paulus and coworkers have conducted the double-slit experiment using a double-slit in time, not space. The "slit" was a crafted femtosecond pulse consisting of one-and-a-half cycles--say, two maxima and one minima--passed through an argon gas. Each maxima has a probability of ionizing an argon atom and producing an electron. The electrons were accelerated to a detector which observed an interference pattern since the detector had no idea which maximum produced the electron."
Just today at lunch I was saying "Wouldn't it be cool to craft a femtosecond pulse consisting of 1.5 cycles, say 2 maxima and 1 minima, passed through argon gas? We could get electrons which could be accelerated then observe the resulting interference patterns!"
Well, that didn't fly. The guys got pissed off and yelled "Shut up and watch the stripper!" so I sheepishly went back to my titties and beer.
Trolling is a art,
New look for classic experiment
2 March 2005
Physicists in Europe and the US have performed a novel version of the double-slit quantum-interference experiment with single electrons. In the classic version of the experiment, electrons pass through a mask containing two parallel slits and produce a pattern of bright and dark interference fringes on a screen. Now, Gerhard Paulus of Texas A&M University and co-workers in Berlin, Munich, Sarajevo and Vienna have observed an interference pattern with electrons that pass through a double slit in time, not space, as a result of being ejected from an atom at one of two possible times by a laser pulse.
The double-slit experiment was first performed with light by Thomas Young over 200 years ago.The formation of the fringes can be explained by the interference of waves travelling from the two slits. When the peaks of the two waves coincide on the screen, the interference is constructive and the result is a bright fringe. However, if the peak of one wave coincides with the trough of the other, destructive interference results in a region of darkness.
The spacing between the fringes depends on the wavelength of the light and the separation of the slits. Similar interference fringes have also been observed with electrons, atoms and molecules, with the fringe spacing depending on the de Broglie wavelength of the particles. Experiments have also shown that an interference pattern builds up even if there is only one particle in the apparatus at any time, and that the pattern disappears if we try to determine which slit it passes through. This process is now understood in terms of interference between the two possible paths through the apparatus, rather than between two waves or particles: if we know "which way" the electron passes through the slits, we do not see interference, and vice versa.
The latest experiment is radically different because the slits exist in time not space, and because the interference pattern appears when the number of electrons at the detector is plotted as a function of their energy rather than their position on a screen. The work was performed at the Technical University of Vienna in collaboration with physicists from the Max Born Institute in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich and the University of Sarajevo.
Paulus and co-workers focused a train of pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser into a chamber containing a gas of argon atoms. The pulses were so short - just 5 femtoseconds - that each one contained just a few cycles of the electric field.
The team was able to control the output of the laser so that all the pulses were identical. The researchers could, for example, ensure that each pulse contained two maxima of the electric field (thatis, two peaks with large positive values) and one minimum (a peak with a large negative value). There was a small probability that an atom would be ionized by one or other of the maxima, which therefore played the role of the slits, with the resulting electron being accelerated towards a detector. If the atom was ionized by the minimum, the electron travelled in the opposite direction towards a second detector.
The team registered the arrival times of the electrons at both detectors and then plotted the number of electrons as a function of energy. The researchers observed interference fringes at the first detector because it was impossible to know if an electron counted by the detector was produced during the first or second maximum.
There was no interference pattern at the second detector because all the electrons were produced at the same time at the minimum. However,when the phase of the laser was changed so that there was one maximum and two minima, interference fringes were seen at the second detector but not at the first. "We have complete which-way information and no which-way information at the same time for the same electron," says Paulus. "It just depends on the direction from which
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
I know I'm probably going to be rated down for not being all-knowing, but could someone try to explain this in a bit more simplific terms? I know what the dual-slit experiment was, but I don't understand the purpose of this particular one.
I've been trying for years to do the double-slit experiment. Alas, the wife still won't go for it.
"Adressen på den hjemmeside, du ønsker at finde, er enten forkert, eller også eksisterer hjemmesiden ikke længere. Du kan prøve følgende:
Tjekke om adressen er stavet rigtigt. Bemærk at det har betydning, om du bruger store eller små bogstaver!"
that may as well have been the writeup, because i don't understand a word of it.
Do you guys get aspirine with your subscription? Cuz if you do, I'm signing up right now...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Not to mention flowers, too...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
"Maximum" is singular. "Maxima" is plural. Minima are similar.
So it's "two maxima and one minimum."
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the double-slit experiment, there is a very clear, non-technical explanation here.
This space for rent.
Relativistic time dilation has been demonstrated by synchronizing atomic clocks and sending one of them into space for a while at high speed. The one sent into space slows down a tiny bit. As I interpret this, one of the clocks is slightly in the past relative to the other one.
Suppose you did the same thing with two entangled particles. The particle sent into orbit be slightly in the past relative to the other one. So would they then be entangled across the dimension of time? Seems like this has big implications, though what they are is beyond me.
The very thought of making 5-femtosecond laser pulses (0.000 000 000 000 005 sec, right?) leaves me feeling dumb and slow.
That aside, someone please clue me in here:
So if the electrons hit the laser when the pulse was at maximum strength they would hit the detector, like the two "beams" of light passed through the slits in Young's experiment? and the ones that pass "between" the maxima and minima get distorted like the blurry edges of the light? thus making "slits" of electrons but at instants in time instead of separate points? (I'm no physics expert but I'm sure you guessed that by now...)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Im going to need alot of pot to understand this one.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
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I can understand the use of a Maxima, it's a solid car. But pairing it with a Minima (I think it's Kia's Minivan model, not sure) is just silly.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Rough trans: The address of the homepage you wish to find is not here or doesn't exist any longer. You can try the following: Check if the address is spelled correctly. Notice that it has meaning if you use capital or lowercase letters!
Or maybe it says something about a moose.
I thought the meaning of the double slit test was to prove that the single electron actually passed through both slits, and in essence interfered with itself.
But in this case we're dealing with two different electrons fired at different times, so it's not quite the same.
Even so, if the electrons create the interference pattern, that means they must have collided... in time? So the second electron reached the point of collision before it was actually fired.
Does that mean that every electron travels every possible path in space AND in time? So whenever it is possible for an electron to be fired, it does, and interferes with all other electrons fired at all other times?
My head hurts. Damn you, Science.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Did they find out the result before they did the experiment?
There's gotta be a Bill & Ted quote in there somewhere.
--- This
Yes.
... I guess it became too technical, oops.
You can read more about the double-slit experiment at wikipedia.
Similar intereference patterns(in time and space) are (relatively) trivial to do with light waves/particles. The other experiments mentioned in the article are instances were these are done with matter, and heavy matter for that matter.
For this experiment, consider an atom that would be ionized, once a strong enough laser is shined[spell?] onto it. These guys, as I understand it, have crafted a laser pulse (think of it as a flow) that goes up, down, and then up again. For the first part, when the laser gets strong enough while it "flows" through the atom, an electron *might* come out, then for the second second maximum, another electron might come out. In the end there will be [two?] one, or zero electrons coming out of this atom, but quantum mechanically there is no way to say which came from which bump in the flow.
What the electron detector detects in the end, again I guess, will be a variation of the detection rate as a function of some phase parameter that looks like an "interference pattern " [read "oscillations"]
10 years ago this experiment would still be a "though experiment".
Looks to be that they have redone the classic double-slit experiment in a new variation.
Instead of having the two slits existing at the same time but in different 3d space, they made the slits in different time, but in same 3d space.
Probably we have the same quantum effect as in the traditional double-slit experiment: When trying to determine which slit the particle passes through the interference pattern goes away, as the waves change change to particles.
It doesn't look to me like they have seen that experimentally yet. Their setup that did not produce the interference pattern looks more like a single-slit to me.
But I think that an attempt to find out at which of the two maxima are ionizing an argon atom should make the interference pattern go away.
I'd love to see a geometric illustration of how this demonstration is identical to Young's, rotated in spacetime.
--
make install -not war
Basically, you can look at light, or electrons, or whatever, as either a particle or a wave. Sometimes one interpretation will work better (light as a particle explains the photoelectric effect, light as a wave explains interference patterns, diffraction, etc). Current state of play is that the wave interpretation is always the best way to look at things, except when you observe the system everything collapses to particles, and when something mathematically inconvenient happens (you can explain the photoelectric effect in terms of waves, but the maths is horrible).
Classic two slit experiment with light consists of shining laser light on a barrier with two slits; each slit produces a diffraction pattern (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction), the diffraction patterns interfere to produce the classic two slit pattern, see same link. This basically works because the laser light is coherent, you can (sort of) treat all the photons coming from the laser like one photon.
If you do this with electrons, because electrons are waves, you get the same patterns. Ditto any other particle.
Even if you do this experiment firing only one electron at a time you will get the same two-slit interference pattern, although 'common sense' tells you the electron can only pass through one of the two slits what actually happens is it passes through both at once. If on the other hand you fit a detector over one slit to register the passage of electrons, so you can tell which slit the electron passes through, you lose the interference pattern, you get two overlapping single slit diffraction patterns, which is not the same thing.
Roughly, if you have two slits and whenever an electron is fired at the slits you do not know which slit it went through, but the classical probability (what you'd expect if you didn't know quantum mechanics) of either slit is 0.5, then you will get a two-slit pattern.
This is basically the same experiment, except instead of two slits in space a little distance apart there are two possible source times for the electron, separated by a small time gap. There is no way to know whether a detected electron was produced at the first or second time, so the maths works out (roughly) the same as for the two slits in space case and you would expect to see the classic two-slits pattern. But it is kind of neat that someone's actually found a way to test that idea.
...how can we turn this into some sort of weapon?
Proverbs 21:19
The experiment is the same as a known one, with a single difference: In the traditional experiment the slits are separated by a difference in the normal 3d space, But in this experiement the slices are at the same place in the normal 3d space but separated by a difference in time.
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**Skip the first part if you know the basics.
If you pass a water wave through a wall with two slits in it, you will get interference. If you put another solid wall (no slits) beyond and parallel to the first wall, you will see that the water line on the 2nd wall looks like a sinewave with magnitude tapering off as you get further from the slits.
If you pass particles (electrons, photons, etc) at a wall with two slits, and place a "detecting wall" beyond the first wall, then the distribution of electrons hitting the detecting wall would be similar to the wave observed against the 2nd wall in the water example.
--New Experiment--
In the new example, two pulses of light can trigger an electron to be released. Think of these two pulses as pulling a trigger on a gun while playing russian roulette. The electron is the bullet and the detector is your head. If you pulled the trigger at 0 secs and 2 secs, you'd expect to see a person die at 0.01 seconds and/or/neither 2.01 seconds, assuming it took 0.01 seconds for the bullet to reach the person and kill him.
The detector, however sees an interference pattern. This is like seeing deaths at 1 second or 1.5 seconds. The interference pattern is measured as a function of time, and instead of seeing two blips in time, they saw a range.
All the "WAHT?!" posts are understandable, given that I'm a physics major and I still find the article unclear in not showing the interference pattern. Is this exhibited in the plot of energy vs. time? That'd make sense to me, given that they are canonically conjugate variables (like position and momentum.) However, the gist is that, analogous to the interference of spatially separated possible paths in the spatial double slit case, two possible paths separated in time are interfering here.
First there was Chinese relativity
"All of your problems, no matter how big or small, 1.2 billion chinese people could give a fuck"
and then there was relative relativity
"No matter what your achievements, your aunt will continue to tell your girlfriend/wife about the time when you ran nude in the garden aged 5"
and now I bring you the Scientific relativity theory
"No matter how smart you think you are, you still look smart to a time splitting physicist"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Cagle has been peddling this theory for quite awhile. Do a quick search on cagle in any of the sci.physics groups and you will see his posts along with extremely patient people who try to point out the flaws in his logic (cough!).
We defeated the Nazis, the next evil: Libertarians
Who is this "We" you refer to?
And since when do people who work hard to support civil liberties get lumped in with people who work even harder to take then away?
I think you need to spend a bit more time at Cato's website and learn what Libertarianism really represents. (Hint: diminished state control of our lives)
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
To demonstrate this, find a sink with two distinct taps. Half-fill the sink with water. Now, turn the taps so that the water drips out slowly from each. You will see ripples spreading out from where the drops strike the water. You'll also see that where the ripples cross, there are light patches, dark patches and some areas that seem to be smooth.
The light and dark patches are where you have constructive interference. If you have a trough, then the trough is deeper than normal and hence appears dark. If you have a peak, the peak is higher than normal and appears light.
the "double slit" experiment was devised by your typical mad scientist. The idea is simple enough. You direct a stream of photons at one of two very narrow gaps. You then have some sort of screen on the other side for the light to shine on. If photons are just particles, then they will go through that one gap and show up as a single spot on the other side.
If, however, particles are waves, they will go through BOTH gaps. The waves will then interfere with each other, as in the sink experiment above, and you'll see patches of light and dark on the other side.
What you get is patches of light and dark, showing that light behaves like a wave.
Now it gets really fun. Turn down the light source. If light is a wave, you expect the same interference pattern, only dimmer. Err, no. What happens is that you start getting a speckled pattern. Eventually, the bands dissolve entirely and you just get a single spot. This proves that light is a particle.
There are a number of ways to resolve this apparent paradox. The simplest is to say that light is a particle that can exist anywhere in the wave with a given probability. With enough particles of light, you see a complete wave, because every possible part of the wave is occupied. With insufficient particles, you get an incomplete wave, and therefore the incomplete interference pattern that you observe.
Now we've got the spacial part over with, we move onto time.
The experiment demonstrates several things. Firstly, it demonstrates that time behaves in a similar manner to space, with regards to objects travelling through it. This will really irritate physicists who have argued that although time and space are coupled, as per Einstein's space/time model, time was not a dimension in the sense that spacial dimensions were. That's going to be a much harder line of reasoning to maintain, now, because clearly time DOES behave in the same way as a spacial dimension, when it comes to diffraction.
The second - and more important - thing that is shown here is that objects do not just have a probability of existing in a specific point in space, they ALSO have a probability of existing in a specific point in time.
Other than causing Professor Hawking a whole bunch of headaches, I don't see this new observation as doing a whole lot. There may be a way to exploit the technique to generate an animated hologram, though, as you'd have a way of influencing interference patterns with respect to time from a single image, but that's about it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's too bad more laypeople don't get into quantum physics, string theory, etc. The implicatisons are pretty amazing on both scientific and spiritual levels, and I have chosen to read much of what this science tells us as: The Universe (Multiverse) is One and Many simultaneously, we are all a part of it, and in essence, are all One. Time is an illusion on the ultimate level, as is the notion of our matter and energy being separate from every other element of the universe. Thus, death as we know it does not truly exist, when what you are is a focal point of the neverending Multiverse (God, if you wanna put it that way -- but that's up to you).
Gee... I wonder why they don't teach any of this stuff in the school system, unless you happen to go into phsyics?
I highly recommend The Tao of Physics by Capra (which I'm sure many scientists loathe). Also writings by Nick Herbert are pretty interesting. A lot of the stuff we are finding equations for now is what many indegenous cultures have taught for thousands and thousands of years. They may have communicated the ideas differently, but they strike me as having the same message.
---
The techno-mediated cultural conspiracy
http://thewired.blogs.com/teotwawki/
Just a randomly picked response to this thread.
Here ya go:
www.timecube.com
There's gotta be a second or fourth corollary to Goodwin's Law here somewhere... mentioning the time cube guy....
You'll be much better off posting in a forum where people don't actually know any real math or physics beyond what they read in Scientific American. Anyone who actually has a clue can see this for the drivel it is just from your abuse of semantics alone.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The "slit" was a crafted femtosecond pulse consisting of one-and-a-half cycles--say, two maxima and one minima--passed through an argon gas.
Anyone who has a femtosecond pulse generator should feel comfortable with this. If not, get access to a two-photon UV femtosecond pulse generator which uses nanosecond-time-scale infrared laser to deplete the terminal state of an F2 laser, based on F2 transitions.
Next, you'll want a healthy dose of argon gas. Argon is used to reduce heat loss in sealed units by slowing down convection inside the air space. You can get argon gas cartridges to prevent wine oxidation, which is a neat little side benefit. A 50L cylinder filled with argon gas to a pressure of 10130 kPa at 30C has approximately 201 moles of argon. Just remember that if you're going to lase with argon, its most efficient transitions are at 488 nm and 514.5 nm.
So now you'll need to create an ion chamber using the argon gas. You'll need a metal conducting can, and a wire electrode in the center which is well insulated from the chamber walls. The chamber, of course, will be filled with argon.
Next, you'll need to use your femtosecond pulse generator to apply a DC voltage between the outer can and center electrode. This will create an electric field, of only a few volts, that sweeps the ions to the oppositely charged electrodes. For some additional fun, if you apply a few hundred volts, the electron emissions will produce "secondary emissions", which amplify the results. I wouldn't recommend creating one of these by hand if you haven't already done so, but remember to use a 4.7uF capacitor with non-polar film, a 100,000 megohm resistor and a 2N4117A electrometer-grade JFET.
Anyways, generating a local maxima shouldn't be too difficult if you keep the phase dynamics of your pulse generator within one half delta of the wavelength propogation delay of your argon gas cylinder. This, as always, varies according to room temperature, so be sure to calibrate your scales before attempting the experiment.
The trickiest part of the experiment is to build a ray tube to display your intereference pattern. I suggest using a Tektronix Type 453 Oscilloscope, which may be hard to find but has the best bang per buck.
In no time at all, you'll be generating double slits in time!
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No, time isn't a wave. As another poster mentioned, time is another dimension.
But it's much more tricky than that, time is very different from space. If you rotate a vector in 3-D space, it's length (x^2+y^2+z^2) will remain the same, even though the x,y, and z components are different and kind of mixed together. What Einstein showed is that in 4-dimension space-time, the quantity (-t^2+x^2+y^2+z^2) is what is conserved if you 'rotate' in 4-D spacetime (in other words, if you change reference frames, like going from standing on the ground to standing on a freigh train). So spatial dimensions look spherical while the time dimension looks hyperbolic.
There are obvious parallels between Space and Time in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, namely a time translation evolves the wavefunction by a factor exp(-i*H*t/hbar) and a spatial translation evolves the wavefunction by a factor exp(-i*p*x/hbar). What this means is that momentum is the 'generator' of space translations, and the 'Hamiltonian' is the generator of time translations.
But making relativity works in quantum mechanics isn't as straightforward as physicists hoped, and involved alot of extra work, which finally culminated as quantum field theory. You can read more detail here . But here's a quick summary :
In quantum mechanics, position and momentum aren't just parameters but are operators. They don't commute, which is why you cannot simultaneously know a position and momentum. But time is NOT an operator, it is a parameter, it's the corresponding Hamiltonian that is the operator. So you have 4-dimensional space, 3 dimensions act like operators, 1 dimension acts as a parameter.
So anyway, back to this experiment, what the physicists did was to show that an electron, with a probability of being created during two discrete times (each of the laser pulses) turns out to have an interference pattern just like photons traveling through two slits in space.
The resulting electrons weren't produced from laser pulse 1 or laser pulse 2, but were produced from a superposition of both pulses, and the complex phase that I showed previously with time evolution causes an interference pattern between the two pulses.
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Take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt; I'm a layman and not a physicist. I'm attempting to translate my layman's understanding of this into clear information that other laymen can understand. I'd appreciate any corrections that will be offered by those who have a better understanding of this and the ability to translate that into plain English.
Wave/Particle Duality is how physicists talk about things on the quantum scale sometimes exhibiting wave-like behavior and other times exhibiting particle-like behavior. Here's an analogy:
Suppose you have a thick metal barrier with two parallel vertical slits, a target a few feet behind the barrier, and a machine gun. You point the gun in the general direction of the target, put it on full auto, and let 'er rip. As you fire, sweep the gun around at random. Many of the bullets will hit the barrier, and many will make it through one slit or the other to make holes in the target behind. After you've emptied a few thousand rounds and examine the target, you'll see a random spray of bullet holes behind the slits. The bullets are like particles, and nothing really surprising comes from this double-slit experiment. Each bullet that hits the target passed through exactly one slit and didn't collide with any other bullet.
Now, visualize a bathtub half full of water, with a vertical barrier separating a quarter of the tub from the other three quarters. Now, use your hands to make waves on the surface of the water in the tub. Watch what happens at the double slit, and the pattern of the water surface at the other end of the tub beyond the barrier. Each wave you make passes through both slits. At both points on the other side where the wave emerges, a new wave effectively starts at each slit individually. As these new waves on the other side of the barrier spread out in a semicircle, they collide and form an interference pattern.
Now, the above two things are easy to visualize because they happen in the macroscopic world of classical physics. A bullet is a discreet object whose position and momentum can both be measured with certainty at any time. A wave on water has measurable properties such as amplitude, wavelength, and speed. In the quantum world, however, it's not so easy. You can't directly observe an atom or an electron or a photon. Instead, you have to bounce electrons and photons and atoms off each other and infer what you can from the results.
This next statement is very important; it's the whole reason QM is so very strange: The bouncing itself invariably transfers energy and therefore changes the object being observed.
Now, we know that quantum objects have particle-like properties. A photon can collide with an atom and either be absorbed or reflected. If they were strictly waves then it would be more like sound waves or waves on a liquid surface; they'd tend to spred out in ever-expanding circles/spheres through the medium that transmits them. You can't create a wave on water that travels in one direction for very long; even the wake of a very large ship disperses over a realtively short distance. However, a laser keeps photons in a tightly focused beam, just like a good sniper rifle can deliver bullets in tight groupings over a mile or more of distance.
On the other hand, quantum particles also act like waves. Light has frequency/wavelength. If you shine a laser through two slits that are close enough and narrow enough, you get an interference pattern on the other side. Atoms, when they have heat, oscillate around a centerpoint; this is called Brownian motion. The frequency of this oscillation (a wave-like property) is a function of its type and temperature.
Electrons are said to "orbit" atoms' nuclei. One way to think of this is with the electron being a tiny particle moving a near lightspeed; at that speed over such tiny distances the electron might as well be a cloud surrounding the nucleus. You'll never be able to take a freeze-frame picture and localize an
We already knew that particles are also waves... What does this experiment show us that's new? Does it show that two particles are a wave, or something?
It tells us nothing new about waves and particles, but it does confirm that there is no difference between a pair of slits separated by space and a pair of slits separated in time.
IOW it confirms that time is just another dimension.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Colin:
For the last time, System Restore and NTBackup are different programs for different purposes. Telling people that System Restore is junk and they should only use NTBackup is a disservice to the Win XP community.
Oh, wait, that's the other redundant and repetitive poster I saw today. Sorry.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
As I have already requested (in a different reply to a different on of your almost entirely redundant posts) a full proof for me to dismantle, I will keep my response to a few key problems (see: fatal flaws) I see in this postulate.
(A) How do you propose to measure velocity using only measurements of the time dimension? Last I checked, velocity is defined as (spatial units translated)/(temporal units translated).
(B) If we simply look at this in two dimensions, restraining spatial coordinates to the x direction, and our second dimension being time, your theory would have the origin of the t axis sliding up and down, while the x axis remains stationary. While this will change the appearance of our visual rendering of the coordinate system (for example, we may draw the x axis intersecting the t axis at t=-4s, for instance), it is simply smoke and mirrors. An event at (t1,6) will always be 4m away from an event at (t1,10). An event at (t2,-5) will always be |t2-t3| away from (t3,-5), no matter how much you shift the numerical origin of your t axis. My point is this: any coordinate system is relative to an arbitrarily chosen origin. While you may renumber your t axis as often as you wish, and thus have it "slide" to and fro relative to your other axes, the relative spacetime differences between events will remain the same.
(C) Sorry, ran a bit long on (B), so i'll make this my last point. This point is one of semantics. You state that the time dimension expands as a spherically symmetric wavefront through space. Thus, you feel the time dimension has spatial components. Therefore, your time "dimension" is not a dimension at all, as it contains an x, y, and z component, each which have a _set_ relationship to one another (they define a sphere, as you explicitly state above). For time to be its own dimension, it must be possible for any relationship of x, y, and z to exist at any point t. Perhaps you stated this in a way you did not intend, or perhaps you simply can't wrap your head around four dimensions.
In any case, please either correct any mistakes or misinterpretations I have made, or shelf your theory until you can make the math work.
Isn't there something meaningful in this observation?
Why would energy change with time? Or is it just that the frequency of electron hits adding an negating are causing the variances in energy?
I'd like to stare at the experiment and the graph... Maybe after burning it into my retinas for a while, then sleeping restlessly, then waking and going to work tomorrow, then forgetting about it for a while, maybe then the understanding will come...
"Physics is cool and all, if you're not quite bright enough to make it in Math" "Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Interesting :) God has exceeded his 40 meg limit. I would never have thought of that myself.
Dr. Elliot's theory of moving dimenstions stands unrefuted.
A lot of crackpot theories stand unrefuted. Not because they are correct, but because it's just not worth any expert's time to refute them.
It would be great if the detractors could use logic and reason in refuting Dr. E's theory, rather than just refuting it by dismissing it.
OK, I'll give it a shot... Bleah. This is as far as I got.
First off, since the universe is expanding, space-time is also expanding, showing that dimensions are moving and expanding.
Wrong. Anybody who says this clearly hasn't understood college level math (or logic). I suggest taking some classes and bone up on the fundamentals, then rewriting your ideas so that they're comprehensible to other scientists.
You actually see the image on the phosphor screen yourself through a window at the base of the column. The image is a bit dim, you you have to have the lights out, but what you see is being imaged directly.
The electrons all have roughly the same energy - a million eV or so - so they are the equivalent of nearly monochromatic light. If your target film varies in thickness, then you get electron Newton's rings because of reflections from the top and bottom surfaces. You can get lots of fringes - out to the 50th or 100th order because the electrons are pretty monochromatic.
Suppose you have a 1 MeV electron beam travelling about 50 cms from your target to the screen. You cannot put more than a few hundred picoamps through your target without frying it. Now you do not get many electrons per second in a picoamp, and they are moving very fast at 1 MeV. I remember doing the sums, and finding out that the whole TEM column for my beam current spent 97% of its time completely empty. The film is only a few nm of this 50 cms, so the odds of it having two transmitting electrons in it at once is really tiny.
You actually see the image on the phosphor screen yourself through a window at the base of the column. The image is a bit dim, so you you have to have all the lights out, but what you see is being imaged directly by the electrons. Or electron, rather, because what you are looking it is the image formed by a single electron interfering fifty or a hundred times with itself after having passed through every point of the target film, and reflecting (or not reflecting) multiple times off each surface.
This as much as anything got me to believe in the wave equations. Trust in the sums and leave your common sense by the door, and it all seems to work.
Obviously only a Nazi would post a time cube link.
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;)
(The real joke here will be clueless mods marking this as flamebait
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
there's no way of determining which of the two bodies will age more quickly and at what rate they will age in relation to each other
Correct, if no one accellerates. So long as they are moving apart then there is no way to determin which is "aging more quickly". For some observers the first one will age faster, and for other observers the second will age faster. The farther apart they get the bigger the discrepance can become. If they are one light-year apart then either one may be seen as up to one year "older" than the other. If they are 10 light years apart then either one may be seen as up to ten years older than the other.
Time can only be compared locally, when they are at the same spot. If they are travenlling at different speeds then they can only be at the same spot once, and then constantly moving apart. Since you only have one time-point you cannot make any "duration" measurments that apply to both. The only way to measure a duration for both of them is to have them at the same location twice, and in order to do that at least one of them needs to accelerate and "return" to the other one. That acceleration will cause that one's space/time axes to "twist". It's hard to explain that "twist" in words, but it's pretty clear in pictures. Anyway, that acceleration and "twist" causes that one to see the other one suddenly age. The one that accelerates and "twists" is the one that has aged less when they get back together. It is acceleration that causes time to "slow down".
Standing here on earth we are constantly accelerated by gravity even though we don't move. That gravitational acceleration causes our clocks to run slower than someone floating out in space. If you could stand just outside a black hole that enormous gravity and enormous acceleration causes your clock to run very slow.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
lthough mathematics is indeed a very precise language, it still fails to define the number 1.
Try looking in here or here both of which conveniently go to some trouble to very explicitly define 1 and number, etc. Philosophy of mathematics has a much mre solid grounding than you apparently imagine.
Secondly - and I'm being very hypothetical here - even though dimensions are implied to be static, surely a reference point within one dimension can move independently of other dimensions? And aren't our observations based on drift relative to the reference point being used?
Welcome to the world of not understanding dimension as used in special and general relativity. It's on a manifold, which is coordinate system indpendent - that's the whole point really - you're talking about moving the coordinate system, when the whole point is that it doesn't matter.
To me, "rotation in 1 dimension" is possible, with a very limited definition of rotation - freedom to change "forward" from a given direction to its opposite.
Actually think about what you're saying for change. Motion (even in one direction) requires time, which we've already said is just another dimension in spacetime, so to have motion we have 2 dimensions and we're not talking about rotation in 1 dimension any more, but in 2. It helps if you pay attention in class, honest.
Does this make sense?
Not in the least, and I shouldn't even be bothered spending nthe time replying, but I'm bored. Please, go read some books on the subject(s) before shooting your mouth off randomly.
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
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Mine smells like hydrogen cyanide. Or does it?
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible -W.B.