SciContest! Why can't matter be made of photons?

[Reiku]

Yes, they are.
But superposition of spin states is only available to "unaligned" electrons; as soon as you measure spin, or as soon as two electrons pair up somehow (not necessarily in an atomic orbital), the spins are determined.

Bingo.

An electron will exhibit both spins simultaneously, because of the wave distribution of the statistical averages of it's possible states, so both a spin up and spin down are superpositioned (or layered or even fused) together, that is, until a disturbance comes along, namely a collapse in the wave function of probability.

That's all the wave function is, is a wave of possibilities, not actualities as of yet.

Now i need to go.

 

[Vkothii]

An electron will exhibit both spins simultaneously

How do you determine an electron has "both spins simultaneously"? How is that measured?

 

[Reiku]

It isn't measured, because any measurement would displace the superpositioning into a single observable. Instead, we assume this must be the case, due to the wave function of all possibilities.

Now, i really do need to go.

 

[funkstar]

Late entry: Photons are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Matter is.

 

[Reiku]

Late entry: Photons are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Matter is.

The photon takes up inhabitence inside the electron. So the interaction of two electrons will still cancel each other out.

 

[Vern]

Late entry: Photons are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Matter is.

An advocate of a photon-only universe idea could claim that the photon state of mass is only potential mass, and in that state is not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. But when the photon's potential is realized and it becomes mass, it is subject.

 

[Reiku]

That's a good one.

I want to add, that the energy of a system shouldn't determine whether an object follows Fermi Statistics or Bose-Einstein Statistics, but rather they are if mass is also subject to discussion.

 

[Janus58]

How am I? I said myself that the electron is made of mass, and the photon is not. So if the electron does have any size, it still needs to be larger than a photon, by theory.

By what "theory" is that?

 

[Reiku]

By what "theory" is that?

That a mass must have a stype of structure similar to a shell. And must be larger than a unit of energy. Check any resources you like. The truth is we don't even have a size for a photon, which is less than what we theoretically know about an electrons radius (even though we can't directly measure it as of yet). But this is the theory i speak of.

 

[John J. Bannan]

If particles and anti-particles annihilate each other and produce massless entities, like photons, it seems obvious that matter is made of such massless entities.

 

[Enmos]

If particles and anti-particles annihilate each other and produce massless entities, like photons, it seems obvious that matter is made of such massless entities.

I think you got the challenge backwards..

 

[Steve100]

If particles and anti-particles annihilate each other and produce massless entities, like photons, it seems obvious that matter is made of such massless entities.

If massless entities, like photons annihilate each other and produce particles and anti-particles, it seems obvious that such massless entities are made of matter.

 

[Reiku]

If massless entities, like photons annihilate each other and produce particles and anti-particles, it seems obvious that such massless entities are made of matter.

If imagining this is difficult, about how to see photons change into a different form, it's much like a quantum leap. It evidently ''fluxes'' and takes the leap into a new configuration. Or, you can even imagine the quantum leap being just right for the E=Mc^2 equation, since this formula says that matter can change into energy, and energy can change into matter. This explains how a positron and an electron come together, to be able to reduce back into the photon energy that they where originally composed from.

 

[Reiku]

It would really be nice if there where such things as antiphotons, almost perfectly identical. That way there can be a type of explanation to how it takes two antiparticles of each other to reduce to energy, if it also requires two antiphotons of energy to transmutate into matter itself.

 

[CptBork]

Well then, after all the interesting banter, it's obvious we can at least say that matter is more than a simple cluster of photons, which I think is what the competition is referring to. Clusters of photons couldn't assume or maintain an inertial rest frame (they'd always be moving at c), and ordinary matter would quickly decay into photons if its was simply composed of bunches of them.

 

[Reiku]

Well then, after all the interesting banter, it's obvious we can at least say that matter is more than a simple cluster of photons, which I think is what the competition is referring to. Clusters of photons couldn't assume or maintain an inertial rest frame (they'd always be moving at c), and ordinary matter would quickly decay into photons if its was simply composed of bunches of them.

I agree. Perhaps even mathematically, there is some kind of coupling constant involved?

 

[Vern]

Well then, after all the interesting banter, it's obvious we can at least say that matter is more than a simple cluster of photons,

Matter could be the state of a photon when it is trapped in a cavity. When in a resonant cavity photons behave like mass. None of the advocates I've seen have suggested matter is a simple cluster of photons. All of them have photons, usually by some other name, trapped in resonant patterns to form the elementary particles. Dr Robert Hofstadter, Nobel 1961, thought the patterns could be shell structures. Hofstadters Shells They are all driven to suspect a photon construct by THE EVIDENCE (caps so the link will stand out) All we have to do to debunk the notion is to show that the evidence is not real.

So i don't think we've ruled out a photon-only universe.

 

[AlphaNumeric]

If particles and anti-particles annihilate each other and produce massless entities, like photons, it seems obvious that matter is made of such massless entities.

Except when you smash together matter and antimatter at high enough energies you get Z bosons instead of photons and Z bosons has masses about 180,000 times that of electrons.

So it's not obvious everything is made of photons when photons aren't always produced.

 

[Vkothii]

Superposition of spin states is only available to "unaligned" electrons; as soon as you measure spin, or as soon as two electrons pair up somehow (not necessarily in an atomic orbital), the spins are determined.

It isn't measured, because any measurement would displace the superpositioning into a single observable. Instead, we assume this must be the case, due to the wave function of all possibilities.

Bingo.

Any fundamental spin 1/2 particle has two possible or available spins, but as soon as they are "against a surface", which we might put there, i.e. measure or align the spin somehow (which is the same analogy Einstein used to explain electron spin in magnets, i.e. as a gyroscope precesses against the earths inertial surface) the spin is determined, which means superposition is a potential "direction", which we or another spin 1/2 particle might put there.

Photons have integer spin, or always have the "same" spin - this is true when they entangle their wavefunctions in certain crystal lattices, and what being "their own antiparticle" means.

 

[Vern]

Except when you smash together matter and antimatter at high enough energies you get Z bosons instead of photons and Z bosons has masses about 180,000 times that of electrons.

An advocate of photon theory could suggest that Z bosons are produced out of the energy of collision and have nothing to do with the make up of mass. They may simply be short-lived photn curls that quickly straighten out and depart as very high energy photons.