In today’s post I’m happily saying that I’ve used the wrong term for this whole time! What I have been describing isn’t refraction. Refraction is a completely different phenomenon. I only realized this when I plotted elementary particles of energy along a helix depicting refracted light.
Observed from the side it just looks like a regular sine wave that it more or less is.
But when I zoomed in to show three dots, I realized that it looked exactly the same as with no refraction:
Then it hit me: refraction isn’t doing anything to the size of the thing that I called “the cone of refraction”. Refraction only rotated the connection points of the dots on the circular surface of the cone.
This might not sound like much, but at least for terminology it is crucially important. One can consider the curved array of elementary particles of energy to be a very flexible rod with a huge number of rotating hinges, with each hinge bent just a bit. Depending on the environment one puts the rod in, it can either look like a circle, or a helix.
So, if there is a constant bend at each hinge of the rod, we can call the our cone, the “cone of bending”. And where does this bending come from? Well, the only way for the elementary particles of energy (dots) to move without bending is if there is sufficient space for the dots to move without collision. However, if one considers an infinitely long straight line of dots, moving a direction perpendicular to the length of the line. This would create an infinitely long wide two-dimensional plane when moving for an infinite length of time. However, if a a tiny bend is introduced between each dot of the almost straight line, it will no longer be infinite, but rather close into a circle. This circle is the quantum of light, which I call a supraphoton in the Theory of Everything manuscript. It's almost the same as a photon, with the exeption that it holds many photons together and it interacts with equally as many molecules as there are photons in it. This sounds as bit odd out of context, but it's just something to do with the mathematical trick that defines a single photon.
And the next important thing to understand is that the dots don't care in which direction they are moving. If the string of dots is not blocked by matter, the dots move in a straight line, arranged into a circle. However, if they are colliding against matter with a refractive index, the dots move in a helical path. Even air has a tiny refractive index, meaning that light moving in air is already moving as a helix. Substances like water and glass have much higher refractive indices, meaning that the string is compressed into a helix with a much narrower diameter, but with a large height of the turn of the helix.
Next what I need to do is to add straight and helical vectors to the circular and helical arrays of dots to completely redo this old illustration.
It seems that as I'm finishing the manuscript, new ideas and clarifications constantly pop up, so I can't be sure if this was the last revelation before I can finalize the manuscript. I know that perfect is the enemy of good. However, I also know that peer reviewers are a lazy/busy bunch. They more or less expect a polished manuscript and are not hesitant to reject manuscripts they don't understand. The responsibility of making the reviewer understand the manuscript relies always on the author. So a certain level of perfectionism is expected, especially in theoretical physics.
And here is a final edit for the night. I decided to work on the above image, but with an individual helical arrow of movement for each and every dot. Here is what it looks like:
Comments