One of the great mysteries of modern (the last 100 years) physics is the constancy of the speed of light. You’ve probably seen the famous E = mc^2, or Einstein equals Mr. Speed of Light squared. That’s not related to the constancy, but c is a constant in that equation. Well, the same Einstein developed Special Relativity with the assumption that c is a constant. The speed of light has been measured precisely in various circumstances, always finding the constant (except, of course, when traveling in a medium, that is, not in a vacuum, where the speed is slower… that’s something to think about).
Nowhere does physics develop why c is a constant.
My hypothesis starts with the assumption that space is quantized, the vacuum field fluctuations (which, I would say, is not an assumption), and the motion of matter through space. Since the light emitted in a vacuum from a moving object doesn’t accumulate the speed of that object (instead staying that constant value), then the speed must be intimately connected with space itself. For example, photons interact with virtual particles which are correlated with the grid of discrete space, so that the frequent absorption and reemission fixes the apparent speed of the photons.
I, then, have a prediction: the photons emitted from a moving object initially have momentum imparted to them by the moving object, but since the photon is so quickly absorbed for the first time, the extra energy is quickly transferred to the vacuum field, so that the photon quickly drops to the constant determined by the character of space. The prediction then is that the vacuum field will be slightly more energized immediately in front of the moving object.
I would think that this could be measured using the Casimir effect.
==Leonard
Leonard, here’s a relevant poem. Bill.
Sharon Olds
The Wellspring (1996)
“Physics”
Her first puzzle had three pieces,
she’d take the last piece, and turn it,
and lower it in, like a sewer-lid,
flush with the street. The bases of the frames
were like wooden fur, guard-hairs sticking out of the
pelt. I’d set one on the floor and spread
the pieces out around it. It makes me
groan to think of Red Riding Hood’s hood
a single, scarlet, pointed piece, how
long since I have seen her. Later, panthers,
500 pieces, and an Annunciation,
1000 pieces, we would gaze, on our elbows,
into its gaps. Now she tells me
that if I were sitting in a twenty-foot barn,
with the doors open at either end,
and a fifty-foot ladder hurtled through the barn
at the speed of light, there would be a moment
–after the last rung was inside the barn
and before the first rung came out the other end–
when the whole fifty-foot ladder woud be
inside the twenty-foot barn, and I believe her,
I have thought her life was inside my life
like that. When she reads the college catalogues, I
look away and hum. I have not grown up
yet, I have lived as my daughter’s mother
the way I had lived as my mother’s daughter,
inside her life. I have not been born yet.
Hi Leonard. Perhaps your theorized momentum transferred to the vacuum energy field is the source of dark energy.