sci.physics Frequently Asked Questions (Part 4 of 4)
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ON SCI.PHYSICS - Part 4/4
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Item 24. Special Relativistic Paradoxes - part (a)
The Barn and the Pole updated 4-AUG-1992 by SIC
--------------------- original by Robert Firth
These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic
doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a
switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the
barn.
Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the speed of
light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special Relativity (SR)
says that a moving object is contracted in the direction of motion: this is
called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if the pole is set in motion
lengthwise, then it will contract in the reference frame of a stationary
observer.
You are that observer, sitting on the barn roof. You see the pole
coming towards you, and it has contracted to a bit less than 40m. So, as
the pole passes through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely
within the barn. At that instant, you close both doors. Of course, you
open them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the
contracted pole shut up in your barn. The runner emerges from the far door
unscathed.
But consider the problem from the point of view of the runner. She
will regard the pole as stationary, and the barn as approaching at high
speed. In this reference frame, the pole is still 80m long, and the barn
is less than 20 meters long. Surely the runner is in trouble if the doors
close while she is inside. The pole is sure to get caught.
Well does the pole get caught in the door or doesn't it? You can't
have it both ways. This is the "Barn-pole paradox." The answer is buried
in the misuse of the word "simultaneously" back in the first sentence of
the story. In SR, that events separated in space that appear simultaneous
in one frame of reference need not appear simultaneous in another frame of
reference. The closing doors are two such separate events.
SR explains that the two doors are never closed at the same time in
the runner's frame of reference. So there is always room for the pole. In
fact, the Lorentz transformation for time is t'=(t-v*x/c^2)/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2).
It's the v*x term in the numerator that causes the mischief here. In the
runner's frame the further event (larger x) happens earlier. The far door
is closed first. It opens before she gets there, and the near door closes
behind her. Safe again - either way you look at it, provided you remember
that simultaneity is not a constant of physics.
References: Taylor and Wheeler's _Spacetime Physics_ is the classic.
Feynman's _Lectures_ are interesting as well.
********************************************************************************
Item 24. Special Relativistic Paradoxes - part (b)
The Twin Paradox updated 04-MAR-1994 by SIC
---------------- original by Kurt Sonnenmoser
A Short Story about Space Travel:
Two twins, conveniently named A and B, both know the rules of
Special Relativity. One of them, B, decides to travel out into space with
a velocity near the speed of light for a time T, after which she returns to
Earth. Meanwhile, her boring sister A sits at home posting to Usenet all
day. When B finally comes home, what do the two sisters find? Special
Relativity (SR) tells A that time was slowed down for the relativistic
sister, B, so that upon her return to Earth, she knows that B will be
younger than she is, which she suspects was the the ulterior motive of the
trip from the start.
But B sees things differently. She took the trip just to get away
>from the conspiracy theorists on Usenet, knowing full well that from her
point of view, sitting in the spaceship, it would be her sister, A, who
was travelling ultrarelativistically for the whole time, so that she would
arrive home to find that A was much younger than she was. Unfortunate, but
worth it just to get away for a while.
What are we to conclude? Which twin is really younger? How can SR
give two answers to the same question? How do we avoid this apparent
paradox? Maybe twinning is not allowed in SR? Read on.
Paradox Resolved:
Much of the confusion surrounding the so-called Twin Paradox
originates from the attempts to put the two twins into different frames ---
without the useful concept of the proper time of a moving body.
SR offers a conceptually very clear treatment of this problem.
First chose _one_ specific inertial frame of reference; let's call it S.
Second define the paths that A and B take, their so-called world lines. As
an example, take (ct,0,0,0) as representing the world line of A, and
(ct,f(t),0,0) as representing the world line of B (assuming that the the
rest frame of the Earth was inertial). The meaning of the above notation is
that at time t, A is at the spatial location (x1,x2,x3)=(0,0,0) and B is at
(x1,x2,x3)=(f(t),0,0) --- always with respect to S.
Let us now assume that A and B are at the same place at the time t1
and again at a later time t2, and that they both carry high-quality clocks
which indicate zero at time t1. High quality in this context means that the
precision of the clock is independent of acceleration. [In principle, a
bunch of muons provides such a device (unit of time: half-life of their
decay).]
The correct expression for the time T such a clock will indicate at
time t2 is the following [the second form is slightly less general than the
first, but it's the good one for actual calculations]:
t2 t2 _______________
/ / / 2 |
T = | d\tau = | dt \/ 1 - [v(t)/c] (1)
/ /
t1 t1
where d\tau is the so-called proper-time interval, defined by
2 2 2 2 2
(c d\tau) = (c dt) - dx1 - dx2 - dx3 .
Furthermore,
d d
v(t) = -- (x1(t), x2(t), x3(t)) = -- x(t)
dt dt
is the velocity vector of the moving object. The physical interpretation
of the proper-time interval, namely that it is the amount the clock time
will advance if the clock moves by dx during dt, arises from considering
the inertial frame in which the clock is at rest at time t --- its
so-called momentary rest frame (see the literature cited below). [Notice
that this argument is only of heuristic value, since one has to assume
that the absolute value of the acceleration has no effect. The ultimate
justification of this interpretation must come from experiment.]
The integral in (1) can be difficult to evaluate, but certain
important facts are immediately obvious. If the object is at rest with
respect to S, one trivially obtains T = t2-t1. In all other cases, T must
be strictly smaller than t2-t1, since the integrand is always less than or
equal to unity. Conclusion: the traveling twin is younger. Furthermore, if
she moves with constant velocity v most of the time (periods of
acceleration short compared to the duration of the whole trip), T will
approximately be given by ____________
/ 2 |
(t2-t1) \/ 1 - [v/c] . (2)
The last expression is exact for a round trip (e.g. a circle) with constant
velocity v. [At the times t1 and t2, twin B flies past twin A and they
compare their clocks.]
Now the big deal with SR, in the present context, is that T (or
d\tau, respectively) is a so-called Lorentz scalar. In other words, its
value does not depend on the choice of S. If we Lorentz transform the
coordinates of the world lines of the twins to another inertial frame S',
we will get the same result for T in S' as in S. This is a mathematical
fact. It shows that the situation of the traveling twins cannot possibly
lead to a paradox _within_ the framework of SR. It could at most be in
conflict with experimental results, which is also not the case.
Of course the situation of the two twins is not symmetric, although
one might be tempted by expression (2) to think the opposite. Twin A is
at rest in one and the same inertial frame for all times, whereas twin B
is not. [Formula (1) does not hold in an accelerated frame.] This breaks
the apparent symmetry of the two situations, and provides the clearest
nonmathematical hint that one twin will in fact be younger than the other
at the end of the trip. To figure out *which* twin is the younger one, use
the formulae above in a frame in which they are valid, and you will find
that B is in fact younger, despite her expectations.
It is sometimes claimed that one has to resort to General
Relativity in order to "resolve" the Twin "Paradox". This is not true. In
flat, or nearly flat, space-time (no strong gravity), SR is completely
sufficient, and it has also no problem with world lines corresponding to
accelerated motion.
References:
Taylor and Wheeler, _Spacetime Physics_ (An *excellent* discussion)
Goldstein, _Classical Mechanics_, 2nd edition, Chap.7 (for a good
general discussion of Lorentz transformations and other SR basics.)
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Item 24. Special Relativistic Paradoxes - part (c)
The Superluminal Scissors updated 31-MAR-1993
------------------------- original by Scott I.Chase
A Gedankenexperiment:
Imagine a huge pair of scissors, with blades one light-year long.
The handle is only about two feet long, creating a huge lever arm,
initially open by a few degrees. Then you suddenly close the scissors.
This action takes about a tenth of a second. Doesn't the contact point
where the two blades touch move down the blades *much* faster than the
speed of light? After all, the scissors close in a tenth of a second, but
the blades are a light-year long. That seems to mean that the contact
point has moved down the blades at the remarkable speed of 10 light-years
per second. This is more than 10^8 times the speed of light! But this
seems to violate the most important rule of Special Relativity - no signal
can travel faster than the speed of light. What's going on here?
Explanation:
We have mistakenly assumed that the scissors do in fact close when
you close the handle. But, in fact, according to Special Relativity, this
is not at all what happens. What *does* happen is that the blades of the
scissors flex. No matter what material you use for the scissors, SR sets a
theoretical upper limit to the rigidity of the material. In short, when
you close the scissors, they bend.
The point at which the blades bend propagates down the blade at
some speed less than the speed of light. On the near side of this point,
the scissors are closed. On the far side of this point, the scissors
remain open. You have, in fact, sent a kind of wave down the scissors,
carrying the information that the scissors have been closed. But this wave
does not travel faster than the speed of light. It will take at least one
year for the tips of the blades, at the far end of the scissors, to feel
any force whatsoever, and, ultimately, to come together to completely close
the scissors.
As a practical matter, this theoretical upper limit to the rigidity
of the metal in the scissors is *far* higher than the rigidity of any real
material, so it would, in practice, take much much longer to close a real
pair of metal scissors with blades as long as these.
One can analyze this problem microscopically as well. The
electromagnetic force which binds the atoms of the scissors together
propagates at the speeds of light. So if you displace some set of atoms in
the scissor (such as the entire handles), the force will not propagate down
the scissor instantaneously, This means that a scissor this big *must*
cease to act as a rigid body. You can move parts of it without other parts
moving at the same time. It takes some finite time for the changing forces
on the scissor to propagate from atom to atom, letting the far tip of the
blades "know" that the scissors have been closed.
Caveat:
The contact point where the two blades meet is not a physical
object. So there is no fundamental reason why it could not move faster
than the speed of light, provided that you arrange your experiment correctly.
In fact it can be done with scissors provided that your scissors are short
enough and wide open to start, very different conditions than those spelled
out in the gedankenexperiment above. In this case it will take you quite
a while to bring the blades together - more than enough time for light to
travel to the tips of the scissors. When the blades finally come together,
if they have the right shape, the contact point can indeed move faster
than light.
Think about the simpler case of two rulers pinned together at an
edge point at the ends. Slam the two rulers together and the contact point
will move infinitely fast to the far end of the rulers at the instant
they touch. So long as the rulers are short enough that contact does not
happen until the signal propagates to the far ends of the rulers, the
rulers will indeed be straight when they meet. Only if the rulers are
too long will they be bent like our very long scissors, above, when they
touch. The contact point can move faster than the speed of light, but
the energy (or signal) of the closing force can not.
An analogy, equivalent in terms of information content, is, say, a
line of strobe lights. You want to light them up one at a time, so that
the `bright' spot travels faster than light. To do so, you can send a
_luminal_ signal down the line, telling each strobe light to wait a
little while before flashing. If you decrease the wait time with
each successive strobe light, the apparent bright spot will travel faster
than light, since the strobes on the end didn't wait as long after getting
the go-ahead, as did the ones at the beginning. But the bright spot
can't pass the original signal, because then the strobe lights wouldn't
know to flash.
********************************************************************************
Item 25.
Tachyons updated: 22-MAR-1993 by SIC
-------- original by Scott I. Chase
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!
-Reginald Buller
It is a well known fact that nothing can travel faster than the
speed of light. At best, a massless particle travels at the speed of light.
But is this really true? In 1962, Bilaniuk, Deshpande, and Sudarshan, Am.
J. Phys. _30_, 718 (1962), said "no". A very readable paper is Bilaniuk
and Sudarshan, Phys. Today _22_,43 (1969). I give here a brief overview.
Draw a graph, with momentum (p) on the x-axis, and energy (E) on
the y-axis. Then draw the "light cone", two lines with the equations E =
+/- p. This divides our 1+1 dimensional space-time into two regions. Above
and below are the "timelike" quadrants, and to the left and right are the
"spacelike" quadrants.
Now the fundamental fact of relativity is that E^2 - p^2 = m^2.
(Let's take c=1 for the rest of the discussion.) For any non-zero value of
m (mass), this is an hyperbola with branches in the timelike regions. It
passes through the point (p,E) = (0,m), where the particle is at rest. Any
particle with mass m is constrained to move on the upper branch of this
hyperbola. (Otherwise, it is "off-shell", a term you hear in association
with virtual particles - but that's another topic.) For massless particles,
E^2 = p^2, and the particle moves on the light-cone.
These two cases are given the names tardyon (or bradyon in more
modern usage) and luxon, for "slow particle" and "light particle". Tachyon
is the name given to the supposed "fast particle" which would move with v>c.
Now another familiar relativistic equation is E =
m*[1-(v/c)^2]^(-.5). Tachyons (if they exist) have v > c. This means that
E is imaginary! Well, what if we take the rest mass m, and take it to be
imaginary? Then E is negative real, and E^2 - p^2 = m^2 < 0. Or, p^2 -
E^2 = M^2, where M is real. This is a hyperbola with branches in the
spacelike region of spacetime. The energy and momentum of a tachyon must
satisfy this relation.
You can now deduce many interesting properties of tachyons. For
example, they accelerate (p goes up) if they lose energy (E goes down).
Futhermore, a zero-energy tachyon is "transcendent," or infinitely fast.
This has profound consequences. For example, let's say that there were
electrically charged tachyons. Since they would move faster than the speed
of light in the vacuum, they should produce Cerenkov radiation. This would
*lower* their energy, causing them to accelerate more! In other words,
charged tachyons would probably lead to a runaway reaction releasing an
arbitrarily large amount of energy. This suggests that coming up with a
sensible theory of anything except free (noninteracting) tachyons is likely
to be difficult. Heuristically, the problem is that we can get spontaneous
creation of tachyon-antitachyon pairs, then do a runaway reaction, making
the vacuum unstable. To treat this precisely requires quantum field theory,
which gets complicated. It is not easy to summarize results here. However,
one reasonably modern reference is _Tachyons, Monopoles, and Related
Topics_, E. Recami, ed. (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978).
However, tachyons are not entirely invisible. You can imagine that
you might produce them in some exotic nuclear reaction. If they are
charged, you could "see" them by detecting the Cerenkov light they produce
as they speed away faster and faster. Such experiments have been done. So
far, no tachyons have been found. Even neutral tachyons can scatter off
normal matter with experimentally observable consequences. Again, no such
tachyons have been found.
How about using tachyons to transmit information faster than the
speed of light, in violation of Special Relativity? It's worth noting
that when one considers the relativistic quantum mechanics of tachyons, the
question of whether they "really" go faster than the speed of light becomes
much more touchy! In this framework, tachyons are *waves* that satisfy a
wave equation. Let's treat free tachyons of spin zero, for simplicity.
We'll set c = 1 to keep things less messy. The wavefunction of a single
such tachyon can be expected to satisfy the usual equation for spin-zero
particles, the Klein-Gordon equation:
(BOX + m^2)phi = 0
where BOX is the D'Alembertian, which in 3+1 dimensions is just
BOX = (d/dt)^2 - (d/dx)^2 - (d/dy)^2 - (d/dz)^2.
The difference with tachyons is that m^2 is *negative*, and m is
imaginary.
To simplify the math a bit, let's work in 1+1 dimensions, with
coordinates x and t, so that
BOX = (d/dt)^2 - (d/dx)^2
Everything we'll say generalizes to the real-world 3+1-dimensional case.
Now - regardless of m, any solution is a linear combination, or
superposition, of solutions of the form
phi(t,x) = exp(-iEt + ipx)
where E^2 - p^2 = m^2. When m^2 is negative there are two essentially
different cases. Either |p| >= |E|, in which case E is real and
we get solutions that look like waves whose crests move along at the
rate |p|/|E| >= 1, i.e., no slower than the speed of light. Or |p| <
|E|, in which case E is imaginary and we get solutions that look waves
that amplify exponentially as time passes!
We can decide as we please whether or not we want to consider the second
sort of solutions. They seem weird, but then the whole business is
weird, after all.
1) If we *do* permit the second sort of solution, we can solve the
Klein-Gordon equation with any reasonable initial data - that is, any
reasonable values of phi and its first time derivative at t = 0. (For
the precise definition of "reasonable," consult your local
mathematician.) This is typical of wave equations. And, also typical
of wave equations, we can prove the following thing: If the solution phi
and its time derivative are zero outside the interval [-L,L] when t = 0,
they will be zero outside the interval [-L-|t|, L+|t|] at any time t.
In other words, localized disturbances do not spread with speed faster
than the speed of light! This seems to go against our notion that
tachyons move faster than the speed of light, but it's a mathematical
fact, known as "unit propagation velocity".
2) If we *don't* permit the second sort of solution, we can't solve the
Klein-Gordon equation for all reasonable initial data, but only for initial
data whose Fourier transforms vanish in the interval [-|m|,|m|]. By the
Paley-Wiener theorem this has an odd consequence: it becomes
impossible to solve the equation for initial data that vanish outside
some interval [-L,L]! In other words, we can no longer "localize" our
tachyon in any bounded region in the first place, so it becomes
impossible to decide whether or not there is "unit propagation
velocity" in the precise sense of part 1). Of course, the crests of
the waves exp(-iEt + ipx) move faster than the speed of light, but these
waves were never localized in the first place!
The bottom line is that you can't use tachyons to send information
faster than the speed of light from one place to another. Doing so would
require creating a message encoded some way in a localized tachyon field,
and sending it off at superluminal speed toward the intended receiver. But
as we have seen you can't have it both ways - localized tachyon disturbances
are subluminal and superluminal disturbances are nonlocal.
********************************************************************************
Item 26.
The Particle Zoo updated 4-JUL-1995 by MCW
---------------- original by Matt Austern
If you look in the Particle Data Book, you will find more than 150
particles listed there. It isn't quite as bad as that, though...
The (observed) particles are divided into two major classes:
the material particles, and the gauge bosons. We'll discuss the gauge
bosons further down. The material particles in turn fall into three
categories: leptons, mesons, and baryons. Leptons are particles that
are like the electron: they have spin 1/2, and they do not undergo the
strong interaction. There are three charged leptons, the electron,
muon, and tau, and three corresponding neutral leptons, or neutrinos.
(The muon and the tau are both short-lived.)
Mesons and baryons both undergo strong interactions. The
difference is that mesons have integral spin (0, 1,...), while baryons have
half-integral spin (1/2, 3/2,...). The most familiar baryons are the
proton and the neutron; all others are short-lived. The most familiar
meson is the pion; its lifetime is 26 nanoseconds, and all other mesons
decay even faster.
Most of those 150+ particles are mesons and baryons, or,
collectively, hadrons. The situation was enormously simplified in the
1960s by the "quark model," which says that hadrons are made out of
spin-1/2 particles called quarks. A meson, in this model, is made out
of a quark and an anti-quark, and a baryon is made out of three
quarks. We don't see free quarks, but only hadrons; nevertheless, the
evidence for quarks is compelling. Quark masses are not very well
defined, since they are not free particles, but we can give estimates.
The masses below are in GeV; the first is current mass and the second
constituent mass (which includes some of the effects of the binding
energy):
Generation: 1 2 3
U-like: u=.006/.311 c=1.50/1.65 t=91-200/91-200
D-like: d=.010/.315 s=.200/.500 b=5.10/5.10
In the quark model, there are only 12 elementary particles,
which appear in three "generations." The first generation consists of
the up quark, the down quark, the electron, and the electron
neutrino. (Each of these also has an associated antiparticle.) These
particles make up all of the ordinary matter we see around us. There
are two other generations, which are essentially the same, but with
heavier particles. The second consists of the charm quark, the
strange quark, the muon, and the muon neutrino; and the third consists
of the top quark, the bottom quark, the tau, and the tau neutrino.
These three generations are sometimes called the "electron family",
the "muon family", and the "tau family."
Finally, according to quantum field theory, particles interact by
exchanging "gauge bosons," which are also particles. The most familiar on
is the photon, which is responsible for electromagnetic interactions.
There are also eight gluons, which are responsible for strong interactions,
and the W+, W-, and Z, which are responsible for weak interactions.
The picture, then, is this:
FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLES OF MATTER
Charge -------------------------
-1 | e | mu | tau |
0 | nu(e) |nu(mu) |nu(tau)|
------------------------- + antiparticles
-1/3 | down |strange|bottom |
2/3 | up | charm | top |
-------------------------
GAUGE BOSONS
Charge Force
0 photon electromagnetism
0 gluons (8 of them) strong force
+-1 W+ and W- weak force
0 Z weak force
The Standard Model of particle physics also predicts the
existence of a "Higgs boson," which has to do with breaking a symmetry
involving these forces, and which is responsible for the masses of all the
other particles. It has not yet been found. More complicated theories
predict additional particles, including, for example, gauginos and sleptons
and squarks (from supersymmetry), W' and Z' (additional weak bosons), X and
Y bosons (from GUT theories), Majorons, familons, axions, paraleptons,
ortholeptons, technipions (from technicolor models), B' (hadrons with
fourth generation quarks), magnetic monopoles, e* (excited leptons), etc.
None of these "exotica" have yet been seen. The search is on!
REFERENCES:
The best reference for information on which particles exist,
their masses, etc., is the Particle Data Book. It is published every
two years; the most recent edition is Physical Review D vol.50 No.3
part 1 August 1994. The Web version can be accessed through
http://pdg.lbl.gov/.
There are several good books that discuss particle physics on a
level accessible to anyone who knows a bit of quantum mechanics. One is
_Introduction to High Energy Physics_, by Perkins. Another, which takes a
more historical approach and includes many original papers, is
_Experimental Foundations of Particle Physics_, by Cahn and Goldhaber.
For a book that is accessible to non-physicists, you could try _The
Particle Explosion_ by Close, Sutton, and Marten. This book has fantastic
photography.
For a Web introduction by the folks at Fermilab, take a look
at http://fnnews.fnal.gov/hep_overview.html .
********************************************************************************
Item 27. original by Scott I. Chase
Does Antimatter Fall Up or Down?
--------------------------------
This question has never been subject to a successful direct experiment.
In other words, nobody has ever directly measured the gravititational
acceleration of antimatter. So the bottom line is that we don't know yet.
However, there is a lot more to say than just that, with regard to both
theory and experiment. Here is a summary of the current state of affairs.
(1) Is is even theoretically possible for antimatter to fall up?
Answer: According to GR, antimatter falls down.
If you believe that General Relativity is the exact true theory of
gravity, then there is only one possible conclusion - by the equivalence
principle, antiparticles must fall down with the same acceleration as
normal matter.
On the other hand: there are other models of gravity which are not ruled out
by direct experiment which are distinct from GR in that antiparticles can
fall down at different rates than normal matter, or even fall up, due to
additional forces which couple to the mass of the particle in ways which are
different than GR. Some people don't like to call these new couplings
'gravity.' They call them, generically, the 'fifth force,' defining gravity
to be only the GR part of the force. But this is mostly a semantic
distinction. The bottom line is that antiparticles won't fall like normal
particles if one of these models is correct.
There are also a variety of arguments, based upon different aspects of
physics, against the possibility of antigravity. These include constraints
imposed by conservation of energy (the "Morrison argument"), the detectable
effects of virtual antiparticles (the "Schiff argument"), and the absense
of gravitational effect in kaon regeneration experiments. Each of these
does in fact rule out *some* models of antigravity. But none of them
absolutely excludes all possible models of antigravity. See the reference
below for all the details on these issues.
(2) Haven't people done experiments to study this question?
There are no valid *direct* experimental tests of whether antiparticles
fall up or down. There was one well-known experiment by Fairbank at
Stanford in which he tried to measure the fall of positrons. He found that
they fell normally, but later analyses of his experiment revealed that
he had not accounted for all the sources of stray electromagnetic fields.
Because gravity is so much weaker than EM, this is a difficult experimental
problem. A modern assessment of the Fairbank experiment is that it was
inconclusive.
In order to reduce the effect of gravity, it would be nice to repeat the
Fairbank experiment using objects with the same magnitude of electric
charge as positrons, but with much more mass, to increase the relative
effect of gravity on the motion of the particle. Antiprotons are 1836
times more massive than positrons, so give you three orders of magnitude
more sensitivity. Unfortunately, making many slow antiprotons which you
can watch fall is very difficult. An experiment is under development
at CERN right now to do just that, and within the next couple of years
the results should be known.
Most people expect that antiprotons *will* fall. But it is important
to keep an open mind - we have never directly observed the effect of
gravity on antiparticles. This experiment, if successful, will definitely
be "one for the textbooks."
Reference: Nieto and Goldman, "The Arguments Against 'Antigravity' and
the Gravitational Acceleration of Antimatter," Physics Reports, v.205,
No. 5, p.221.
********************************************************************************
Item 28.
What is the Mass of a Photon? updated 24-JUL-1992 by SIC
original by Matt Austern
Or, "Does the mass of an object depend on its velocity?"
This question usually comes up in the context of wondering whether
photons are really "massless," since, after all, they have nonzero energy.
The problem is simply that people are using two different definitions of
mass. The overwhelming consensus among physicists today is to say that
photons are massless. However, it is possible to assign a "relativistic
mass" to a photon which depends upon its wavelength. This is based upon
an old usage of the word "mass" which, though not strictly wrong, is not
used much today.
The old definition of mass, called "relativistic mass," assigns
a mass to a particle proportional to its total energy E, and involved
the speed of light, c, in the proportionality constant:
m = E / c^2. (1)
This definition gives every object a velocity-dependent mass.
The modern definition assigns every object just one mass, an
invariant quantity that does not depend on velocity. This is given by
m = E_0 / c^2, (2)
where E_0 is the total energy of that object at rest.
The first definition is often used in popularizations, and in some
elementary textbooks. It was once used by practicing physicists, but for
the last few decades, the vast majority of physicists have instead used the
second definition. Sometimes people will use the phrase "rest mass," or
"invariant mass," but this is just for emphasis: mass is mass. The
"relativistic mass" is never used at all. (If you see "relativistic mass"
in your first-year physics textbook, complain! There is no reason for books
to teach obsolete terminology.)
Note, by the way, that using the standard definition of mass, the
one given by Eq. (2), the equation "E = m c^2" is *not* correct. Using the
standard definition, the relation between the mass and energy of an object
can be written as
E = m c^2 / sqrt(1 -v^2/c^2), (3)
or as
E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2, (4)
where v is the object's velocity, and p is its momentum.
In one sense, any definition is just a matter of convention. In
practice, though, physicists now use this definition because it is much
more convenient. The "relativistic mass" of an object is really just the
same as its energy, and there isn't any reason to have another word for
energy: "energy" is a perfectly good word. The mass of an object, though,
is a fundamental and invariant property, and one for which we do need a
word.
The "relativistic mass" is also sometimes confusing because it
mistakenly leads people to think that they can just use it in the Newtonian
relations
F = m a (5)
and
F = G m1 m2 / r^2. (6)
In fact, though, there is no definition of mass for which these
equations are true relativistically: they must be generalized. The
generalizations are more straightforward using the standard definition
of mass than using "relativistic mass."
Oh, and back to photons: people sometimes wonder whether it makes
sense to talk about the "rest mass" of a particle that can never be at
rest. The answer, again, is that "rest mass" is really a misnomer, and it
is not necessary for a particle to be at rest for the concept of mass to
make sense. Technically, it is the invariant length of the particle's
four-momentum. (You can see this from Eq. (4).) For all photons this is
zero. On the other hand, the "relativistic mass" of photons is frequency
dependent. UV photons are more energetic than visible photons, and so are
more "massive" in this sense, a statement which obscures more than it
elucidates.
Reference: Lev Okun wrote a nice article on this subject in the
June 1989 issue of Physics Today, which includes a historical discussion
of the concept of mass in relativistic physics.
********************************************************************************
Item 29. original by David Brahm
Baryogenesis - Why Are There More Protons Than Antiprotons?
-----------------------------------------------------------
(I) How do we really *know* that the universe is not matter-antimatter
symmetric?
(a) The Moon: Neil Armstrong did not annihilate, therefore the moon
is made of matter.
(b) The Sun: Solar cosmic rays are matter, not antimatter.
(c) The other Planets: We have sent probes to almost all. Their survival
demonstrates that the solar system is made of matter.
(d) The Milky Way: Cosmic rays sample material from the entire galaxy.
In cosmic rays, protons outnumber antiprotons 10^4 to 1.
(e) The Universe at large: This is tougher. If there were antimatter
galaxies then we should see gamma emissions from annihilation. Its absence
is strong evidence that at least the nearby clusters of galaxies (e.g., Virgo)
are matter-dominated. At larger scales there is little proof.
However, there is a problem, called the "annihilation catastrophe"
which probably eliminates the possibility of a matter-antimatter symmetric
universe. Essentially, causality prevents the separation of large chucks
of antimatter from matter fast enough to prevent their mutual annihilation
in in the early universe. So the Universe is most likely matter dominated.
(II) How did it get that way?
Annihilation has made the asymmetry much greater today than in the
early universe. At the high temperature of the first microsecond, there
were large numbers of thermal quark-antiquark pairs. K&T estimate 30
million antiquarks for every 30 million and 1 quarks during this epoch.
That's a tiny asymmetry. Over time most of the antimatter has annihilated
with matter, leaving the very small initial excess of matter to dominate
the Universe.
Here are a few possibilities for why we are matter dominated today:
a) The Universe just started that way.
Not only is this a rather sterile hypothesis, but it doesn't work under
the popular "inflation" theories, which dilute any initial abundances.
b) Baryogenesis occurred around the Grand Unified (GUT) scale (very early).
Long thought to be the only viable candidate, GUT's generically have
baryon-violating reactions, such as proton decay (not yet observed).
c) Baryogenesis occurred at the Electroweak Phase Transition (EWPT).
This is the era when the Higgs first acquired a vacuum expectation value
(vev), so other particles acquired masses. Pure Standard Model physics.
Sakharov enumerated 3 necessary conditions for baryogenesis:
(1) Baryon number violation. If baryon number is conserved in all
reactions, then the present baryon asymmetry can only reflect asymmetric
initial conditions, and we are back to case (a), above.
(2) C and CP violation. Even in the presence of B-violating
reactions, without a preference for matter over antimatter the B-violation
will take place at the same rate in both directions, leaving no excess.
(3) Thermodynamic Nonequilibrium. Because CPT guarantees equal
masses for baryons and antibaryons, chemical equilibrium would drive the
necessary reactions to correct for any developing asymmetry.
It turns out the Standard Model satisfies all 3 conditions:
(1) Though the Standard Model conserves B classically (no terms in
the Lagrangian violate B), quantum effects allow the universe to tunnel
between vacua with different values of B. This tunneling is _very_
suppressed at energies/temperatures below 10 TeV (the "sphaleron mass"),
_may_ occur at e.g. SSC energies (controversial), and _certainly_ occurs at
higher temperatures.
(2) C-violation is commonplace. CP-violation (that's "charge
conjugation" and "parity") has been experimentally observed in kaon
decays, though strictly speaking the Standard Model probably has
insufficient CP-violation to give the observed baryon asymmetry.
(3) Thermal nonequilibrium is achieved during first-order phase
transitions in the cooling early universe, such as the EWPT (at T = 100 GeV
or so). As bubbles of the "true vacuum" (with a nonzero Higgs vev)
percolate and grow, baryogenesis can occur at or near the bubble walls.
A major theoretical problem, in fact, is that there may be _too_
_much_ B-violation in the Standard Model, so that after the EWPT is
complete (and condition 3 above is no longer satisfied) any previously
generated baryon asymmetry would be washed out.
References: Kolb and Turner, _The Early Universe_;
Dine, Huet, Singleton & Susskind, Phys.Lett.B257:351 (1991);
Dine, Leigh, Huet, Linde & Linde, Phys.Rev.D46:550 (1992).
********************************************************************************
Item 30.
The EPR Paradox and Bell's Inequality Principle updated 31-AUG-1993 by SIC
----------------------------------------------- original by John Blanton
In 1935 Albert Einstein and two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and
Nathan Rosen (EPR) developed a thought experiment to demonstrate what they
felt was a lack of completeness in quantum mechanics. This so-called "EPR
paradox" has led to much subsequent, and still on-going, research. This
article is an introduction to EPR, Bell's inequality, and the real
experiments which have attempted to address the interesting issues raised
by this discussion.
One of the principal features of quantum mechanics is that not all
the classical physical observables of a system can be simultaneously known,
either in practice or in principle. Instead, there may be several sets of
observables which give qualitatively different, but nonetheless complete
(maximal possible) descriptions of a quantum mechanical system. These sets
are sets of "good quantum numbers," and are also known as "maximal sets of
commuting observables." Observables from different sets are "noncommuting
observables."
A well known example of noncommuting observables is position and
momentum. You can put a subatomic particle into a state of well-defined
momentum, but then you cannot know where it is - it is, in fact, everywhere
at once. It's not just a matter of your inability to measure, but rather,
an intrinsic property of the particle. Conversely, you can put a particle
in a definite position, but then its momentum is completely ill-defined.
You can also create states of intermediate knowledge of both observables:
If you confine the particle to some arbitrarily large region of space,
you can define the momentum more and more precisely. But you can never
know both, exactly, at the same time.
Position and momentum are continuous observables. But the same
situation can arise for discrete observables such as spin. The quantum
mechanical spin of a particle along each of the three space axes is a set
of mutually noncommuting observables. You can only know the spin along one
axis at a time. A proton with spin "up" along the x-axis has undefined
spin along the y and z axes. You cannot simultaneously measure the x and y
spin projections of a proton. EPR sought to demonstrate that this
phenomenon could be exploited to construct an experiment which would
demonstrate a paradox which they believed was inherent in the
quantum-mechanical description of the world.
They imagined two physical systems that are allowed to interact
initially so that they subsequently will be defined by a single Schrodinger
wave equation (SWE). [For simplicity, imagine a simple physical
realization of this idea - a neutral pion at rest in your lab, which decays
into a pair of back-to-back photons. The pair of photons is described
by a single two-particle wave function.] Once separated, the two systems
[read: photons] are still described by the same SWE, and a measurement of
one observable of the first system will determine the measurement of the
corresponding observable of the second system. [Example: The neutral pion
is a scalar particle - it has zero angular momentum. So the two photons
must speed off in opposite directions with opposite spin. If photon 1
is found to have spin up along the x-axis, then photon 2 *must* have spin
down along the x-axis, since the total angular momentum of the final-state,
two-photon, system must be the same as the angular momentum of the intial
state, a single neutral pion. You know the spin of photon 2 even without
measuring it.] Likewise, the measurement of another observable of the first
system will determine the measurement of the corresponding observable of the
second system, even though the systems are no longer physically linked in
the traditional sense of local coupling.
However, QM prohibits the simultaneous knowledge of more than one
mutually noncommuting observable of either system. The paradox of EPR is
the following contradiction: For our coupled systems, we can measure
observable A of system I [for example, photon 1 has spin up along the
x-axis; photon 2 must therefore have x-spin down.] and observable B of
system II [for example, photon 2 has spin down along the y-axis; therefore
the y-spin of photon 1 must be up.] thereby revealing both observables for
both systems, contrary to QM.
QM dictates that this should be impossible, creating the
paradoxical implication that measuring one system should "poison" any
measurement of the other system, no matter what the distance between
them. [In one commonly studied interpretation, the mechanism by which
this proceeds is 'instantaneous collapse of the wavefunction'. But
the rules of QM do not require this interpretation, and several
other perfectly valid interpretations exist.] The second system
would instantaneously be put into a state of well-defined observable A,
and, consequently, ill-defined observable B, spoiling the measurement.
Yet, one could imagine the two measurements were so far apart in
space that special relativity would prohibit any influence of one
measurement over the other. [After the neutral-pion decay, we can wait until
the two photons are a light-year apart, and then "simultaneously" measure
the x-spin of photon 1 and the y-spin of photon 2. QM suggests that if,
for example, the measurement of the photon 1 x-spin happens first, this
measurement must instantaneously force photon 2 into a state of ill-defined
y-spin, even though it is light-years away from photon 1.
How do we reconcile the fact that photon 2 "knows" that the x-spin
of photon 1 has been measured, even though they are separated by
light-years of space and far too little time has passed for information
to have travelled to it according to the rules of Special Relativity?
There are basically two choices. You can accept the postulates of QM
as a fact of life, in spite of its seemingly uncomfortable coexistence
with special relativity, or you can postulate that QM is not complete,
that there *was* more information available for the description of the
two-particle system at the time it was created, carried away by both
photons, and that you just didn't know it because QM does not properly
account for it.
So, EPR postulated that the existence of hidden variables, some
so-far unknown properties, of the systems should account for the discrepancy.
Their claim was that QM theory is incomplete; it does not completely
describe the physical reality. System II knows all about System I
long before the scientist measures any of the observables, thereby
supposedly consigning the other noncommuting observables to obscurity.
No instantaneous action-at-a-distance is necessary in this picture,
which postulates that each System has more parameters than are
accounted by QM. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of QM, held the opposite
view and defended a strict interpretation, the Copenhagen Interpretation,
of QM.
In 1964 John S. Bell proposed a mechanism to test for the existence
of these hidden parameters, and he developed his inequality principle as
the basis for such a test.
Use the example of two photons configured in the singlet state,
consider this: After separation, each photon will have spin values for
each of the three axes of space, and each spin can have one of two values;
call them up and down. Call the axes A, B and C and call the spin in the A
axis A+ if it is up in that axis, otherwise call it A-. Use similar
definitions for the other two axes.
Now perform the experiment. Measure the spin in one axis of one
particle and the spin in another axis of the other photon. If EPR were
correct, each photon will simultaneously have properties for spin in each
of axes A, B and C.
Look at the statistics. Perform the measurements with a number of
sets of photons. Use the symbol N(A+, B-) to designate the words "the
number of photons with A+ and B-." Similarly for N(A+, B+), N(B-, C+),
etc. Also use the designation N(A+, B-, C+) to mean "the number of photons
with A+, B- and C+," and so on. It's easy to demonstrate that for a set of
photons
(1) N(A+, B-) = N(A+, B-, C+) + N(A+, B-, C-)
because all of the (A+, B-, C+) and all of the (A+, B-, C-) photons are
included in the designation (A+, B-), and nothing else is included in N(A+,
B-). You can make this claim if these measurements are connected to some
real properties of the photons.
Let n[A+, B+] be the designation for "the number of measurements of
pairs of photons in which the first photon measured A+, and the second
photon measured B+." Use a similar designation for the other possible
results. This is necessary because this is all it is possible to measure.
You can't measure both A and B of the same photon. Bell demonstrated that
in an actual experiment, if (1) is true (indicating real properties), then
the following must be true:
(2) n[A+, B+] <= n[A+, C+] + n[B+, C-].
Additional inequality relations can be written by just making the
appropriate permutations of the letters A, B and C and the two signs. This
is Bell's inequality principle, and it is proved to be true if there are
real (perhaps hidden) parameters to account for the measurements.
At the time Bell's result first became known, the experimental
record was reviewed to see if any known results provided evidence against
locality. None did. Thus an effort began to develop tests of Bell's
inequality. A series of experiments was conducted by Aspect ending with one
in which polarizer angles were changed while the photons were `in flight'.
This was widely regarded at the time as being a reasonably conclusive
experiment confirming the predictions of QM.
Three years later Franson published a paper showing that the timing
constraints in this experiment were not adequate to confirm that locality
was violated. Aspect measured the time delays between detections of photon
pairs. The critical time delay is that between when a polarizer angle is
changed and when this affects the statistics of detecting photon pairs.
Aspect estimated this time based on the speed of a photon and the distance
between the polarizers and the detectors. Quantum mechanics does not allow
making assumptions about *where* a particle is between detections. We
cannot know *when* a particle traverses a polarizer unless we detect the
particle *at* the polarizer.
Experimental tests of Bell's inequality are ongoing but none has
yet fully addressed the issue raised by Franson. In addition there is an
issue of detector efficiency. By postulating new laws of physics one can
get the expected correlations without any nonlocal effects unless the
detectors are close to 90% efficient. The importance of these issues is a
matter of judgement.
The subject is alive theoretically as well. In the 1970's
Eberhard derived Bell's result without reference to local hidden variable
theories; it applies to all local theories. Eberhard also showed that the
nonlocal effects that QM predicts cannot be used for superluminal
communication. The subject is not yet closed, and may yet provide more
interesting insights into the subtleties of quantum mechanics.
REFERENCES:
1. A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen: "Can quantum-mechanical
description of physical reality be considered complete?"
Physical Review 41, 777 (15 May 1935). (The original EPR paper)
2. D. Bohm: Quantum Theory, Dover, New York (1957). (Bohm
discusses some of his ideas concerning hidden variables.)
3. N. Herbert: Quantum Reality, Doubleday. (A very good
popular treatment of EPR and related issues)
4. M. Gardner: Science - Good, Bad and Bogus, Prometheus Books.
(Martin Gardner gives a skeptics view of the fringe science
associated with EPR.)
5. J. Gribbin: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, Bantam Books.
(A popular treatment of EPR and the paradox of "Schrodinger's
cat" that results from the Copenhagen interpretation)
6. N. Bohr: "Can quantum-mechanical description of physical
reality be considered complete?" Physical Review 48, 696 (15 Oct
1935). (Niels Bohr's response to EPR)
7. J. Bell: "On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox" Physics 1
#3, 195 (1964).
8. J. Bell: "On the problem of hidden variables in quantum
mechanics" Reviews of Modern Physics 38 #3, 447 (July 1966).
9. D. Bohm, J. Bub: "A proposed solution of the measurement
problem in quantum mechanics by a hidden variable theory"
Reviews of Modern Physics 38 #3, 453 (July 1966).
10. B. DeWitt: "Quantum mechanics and reality" Physics Today p.
30 (Sept 1970).
11. J. Clauser, A. Shimony: "Bell's theorem: experimental
tests and implications" Rep. Prog. Phys. 41, 1881 (1978).
12. A. Aspect, Dalibard, Roger: "Experimental test of Bell's
inequalities using time- varying analyzers" Physical Review
Letters 49 #25, 1804 (20 Dec 1982).
13. A. Aspect, P. Grangier, G. Roger: "Experimental realization
of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm gedankenexperiment; a new
violation of Bell's inequalities" Physical Review Letters 49
#2, 91 (12 July 1982).
14. A. Robinson: "Loophole closed in quantum mechanics test"
Science 219, 40 (7 Jan 1983).
15. B. d'Espagnat: "The quantum theory and reality" Scientific
American 241 #5 (November 1979).
16. "Bell's Theorem and Delayed Determinism", Franson, Physical Review D,
pgs. 2529-2532, Vol. 31, No. 10, May 1985.
17. "Bell's Theorem without Hidden Variables", P. H. Eberhard, Il Nuovo
Cimento, 38 B 1, pgs. 75-80, (1977).
18. "Bell's Theorem and the Different Concepts of Locality", P. H.
Eberhard, Il Nuovo Cimento 46 B, pgs. 392-419, (1978).
********************************************************************************
Item 31.
Some Frequently Asked Questions About Virtual Particles
-------------------------------------------------------
original By Matt McIrvin
Contents:
1. What are virtual particles?
2. How can they be responsible for attractive forces?
3. Do they violate energy conservation?
4. Do they go faster than light? Do virtual particles contradict
relativity or causality?
5. I hear physicists saying that the "quantum of the gravitational
force" is something called a graviton. Doesn't general
relativity say that gravity isn't a force at all?
1. What are virtual particles?
One of the first steps in the development of quantum mechanics was
Max Planck's idea that a harmonic oscillator (classically, anything that
wiggles like a mass bobbing on the end of an ideal spring) cannot have just
any energy. Its possible energies come in a discrete set of equally spaced
levels.
An electromagnetic field wiggles in the same way when it possesses
waves. Applying quantum mechanics to this oscillator reveals that it must
also have discrete, evenly spaced energy levels. These energy levels are
what we usually identify as different numbers of photons. The higher the
energy level of a vibrational mode, the more photons there are. In this
way, an electromagnetic wave acts as if it were made of particles. The
electromagnetic field is a quantum field.
Electromagnetic fields can do things other than vibration. For
instance, the electric field produces an attractive or repulsive force
between charged objects, which varies as the inverse square of distance.
The force can change the momenta of the objects.
Can this be understood in terms of photons as well? It turns out
that, in a sense, it can. We can say that the particles exchange "virtual
photons" which carry the transferred momentum. Here is a picture (a
"Feynman diagram") of the exchange of one virtual photon.
\ /
\ <- p /
>~~~ / ^ time
/ ~~~~ / |
/ ~~~< |
/ \ ---> space
/ \
The lines on the left and right represent two charged particles,
and the wavy line (jagged because of the limitations of ASCII) is a virtual
photon, which transfers momentum from one to the other. The particle that
emits the virtual photon loses momentum p in the recoil, and the other
particle gets the momentum.
This is a seemingly tidy explanation. Forces don't happen because
of any sort of action at a distance, they happen because of virtual
particles that spew out of things and hit other things, knocking them
around. However, this is misleading. Virtual particles are really not
just like classical bullets.
2. How can they be responsible for attractive forces?
The most obvious problem with a simple, classical picture of
virtual particles is that this sort of behavior can't possibly result in
attractive forces. If I throw a ball at you, the recoil pushes me back;
when you catch the ball, you are pushed away from me. How can this attract
us to each other? The answer lies in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Suppose that we are trying to calculate the probability (or,
actually, the probability amplitude) that some amount of momentum, p, gets
transferred between a couple of particles that are fairly well- localized.
The uncertainty principle says that definite momentum is associated with a
huge uncertainty in position. A virtual particle with momentum p
corresponds to a plane wave filling all of space, with no definite position
at all. It doesn't matter which way the momentum points; that just
determines how the wavefronts are oriented. Since the wave is everywhere,
the photon can be created by one particle and absorbed by the other, no
matter where they are. If the momentum transferred by the wave points in
the direction from the receiving particle to the emitting one, the effect
is that of an attractive force.
The moral is that the lines in a Feynman diagram are not to be
interpreted literally as the paths of classical particles. Usually, in
fact, this interpretation applies to an even lesser extent than in my
example, since in most Feynman diagrams the incoming and outgoing particles
are not very well localized; they're supposed to be plane waves too.
3. Do they violate energy conservation?
We are really using the quantum-mechanical approximation method
known as perturbation theory. In perturbation theory, systems can go
through intermediate "virtual states" that normally have energies different
>from that of the initial and final states. This is because of another
uncertainty principle, which relates time and energy.
In the pictured example, we consider an intermediate state with a
virtual photon in it. It isn't classically possible for a charged particle
to just emit a photon and remain unchanged (except for recoil) itself. The
state with the photon in it has too much energy, assuming conservation of
momentum. However, since the intermediate state lasts only a short time,
the state's energy becomes uncertain, and it can actually have the same
energy as the initial and final states. This allows the system to pass
through this state with some probability without violating energy
conservation.
Some descriptions of this phenomenon instead say that the energy of
the *system* becomes uncertain for a short period of time, that energy is
somehow "borrowed" for a brief interval. This is just another way of
talking about the same mathematics. However, it obscures the fact that all
this talk of virtual states is just an approximation to quantum mechanics,
in which energy is conserved at all times. The way I've described it also
corresponds to the usual way of talking about Feynman diagrams, in which
energy is conserved, but virtual particles can carry amounts of energy not
normally allowed by the laws of motion.
(General relativity creates a different set of problems for energy
conservation; that's described elsewhere in the sci.physics FAQ.)
4. Do they go faster than light? Do virtual particles contradict
relativity or causality?
In section 2, the virtual photon's plane wave is seemingly created
everywhere in space at once, and destroyed all at once. Therefore, the
interaction can happen no matter how far the interacting particles are from
each other. Quantum field theory is supposed to properly apply special
relativity to quantum mechanics. Yet here we have something that, at least
at first glance, isn't supposed to be possible in special relativity: the
virtual photon can go from one interacting particle to the other faster
than light! It turns out, if we sum up all possible momenta, that the
amplitude for transmission drops as the virtual particle's final position
gets further and further outside the light cone, but that's small
consolation. This "superluminal" propagation had better not transmit any
information if we are to retain the principle of causality.
I'll give a plausibility argument that it doesn't in the context of
a thought experiment. Let's try to send information faster than light with
a virtual particle.
Suppose that you and I make repeated measurements of a quantum
field at distant locations. The electromagnetic field is sort of a
complicated thing, so I'll use the example of a field with just one
component, and call it F. To make things even simpler, we'll assume that
there are no "charged" sources of the F field or real F particles
initially. This means that our F measurements should fluctuate quantum-
mechanically around an average value of zero. You measure F (really, an
average value of F over some small region) at one place, and I measure it a
little while later at a place far away. We do this over and over, and wait
a long time between the repetitions, just to be safe.
.
.
.
------X
------
X------
^ time
------X me |
------ |
you X------ ---> space
After a large number of repeated field measurements we compare notes.
We discover that our results are not independent; the F values are
correlated with each other-- even though each individual set of
measurements just fluctuates around zero, the fluctuations are not
completely independent. This is because of the propagation of virtual
quanta of the F field, represented by the diagonal lines. It happens
even if the virtual particle has to go faster than light.
However, this correlation transmits no information. Neither of us
has any control over the results we get, and each set of results looks
completely random until we compare notes (this is just like the resolution
of the famous EPR "paradox").
You can do things to fields other than measure them. Might you
still be able to send a signal? Suppose that you attempt, by some series
of actions, to send information to me by means of the virtual particle. If
we look at this from the perspective of someone moving to the right at a
high enough speed, special relativity says that in that reference frame,
the effect is going the other way:
.
.
.
X------
------
------X
you X------ ^ time
------ |
------X me |
---> space
Now it seems as if I'm affecting what happens to you rather than the
other way around. (If the quanta of the F field are not the same as
their antiparticles, then the transmission of a virtual F particle
>from you to me now looks like the transmission of its antiparticle
>from me to you.) If all this is to fit properly into special
relativity, then it shouldn't matter which of these processes "really"
happened; the two descriptions should be equally valid.
We know that all of this was derived from quantum mechanics, using
perturbation theory. In quantum mechanics, the future quantum state of a
system can be derived by applying the rules for time evolution to its
present quantum state. No measurement I make when I "receive" the particle
can tell me whether you've "sent" it or not, because in one frame that
hasn't happened yet! Since my present state must be derivable from past
events, if I have your message, I must have gotten it by other means. The
virtual particle didn't "transmit" any information that I didn't have
already; it is useless as a means of faster-than-light communication.
The order of events does *not* vary in different frames if the
transmission is at the speed of light or slower. Then, the use of virtual
particles as a communication channel is completely consistent with quantum
mechanics and relativity. That's fortunate: since all particle
interactions occur over a finite time interval, in a sense *all* particles
are virtual to some extent.
5. I hear physicists saying that the "quantum of the gravitational
force" is something called a graviton. Doesn't general relativity
say that gravity isn't a force at all?
You don't have to accept that gravity is a "force" in order to
believe that gravitons might exist. According to QM, anything that behaves
like a harmonic oscillator has discrete energy levels, as I said in part 1.
General relativity allows gravitational waves, ripples in the geometry of
spacetime which travel at the speed of light. Under a certain definition
of gravitational energy (a tricky subject), the wave can be said to carry
energy. If QM is ever successfully applied to GR, it seems sensible to
expect that these oscillations will also possess discrete "gravitational
energies," corresponding to different numbers of gravitons.
Quantum gravity is not yet a complete, established theory, so
gravitons are still speculative. It is also unlikely that individual
gravitons will be detected anytime in the near future.
Furthermore, it is not at all clear that it will be useful to think
of gravitational "forces," such as the one that sticks you to the earth's
surface, as mediated by virtual gravitons. The notion of virtual particles
mediating static forces comes from perturbation theory, and if there is one
thing we know about quantum gravity, it's that the usual way of doing
perturbation theory doesn't work.
Quantum field theory is plagued with infinities, which show up in
diagrams in which virtual particles go in closed loops. Normally these
infinities can be gotten rid of by "renormalization," in which infinite
"counterterms" cancel the infinite parts of the diagrams, leaving finite
results for experimentally observable quantities. Renormalization works for
QED and the other field theories used to describe particle interactions,
but it fails when applied to gravity. Graviton loops generate an infinite
family of counterterms. The theory ends up with an infinite number of free
parameters, and it's no theory at all. Other approaches to quantum gravity
are needed, and they might not describe static fields with virtual
gravitons.
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END OF FAQ