Light and Heat
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Light and Heat |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | John Huang |
| Keywords | Photons |
| Published | 2011 |
| No. of pages | 10 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Heat is the most important energy we need. There are two ways to transport heat. One is called radiation and the other one is by contact. However, people should know that both of them are collisions. You may wonder how can we call a soft touch, the contact of a hot iron or fire, a collision? Even an energy radiation, with very fast speed, is not considered a collision. Because we don't think an energy pack has a boundary so that we should name the radiation related activities as absorption and emission, isn't it? However, if we consider a photon is a particle, then, collision will be a proper word for radiation. My idea is that if one of the collision parties is a photon, then, the collision is named radiation. If both parties in a collision are photons then the collision is related to the transportation of heat but the possibility of that kind of collisions is so tiny that people can ignore it for the time being. When the technology is ready to detect that kind of collision then people can name it and study it. If at least one of two parties in a collision contains atoms then it is the 2nd way of transporting heat and people can measure the temperature of the party with atoms. I don't have a good name for it yet, let me call it "contact" for now. I will explain my definition in more detail.
Light is a pulse or a ray of photons. Light is a wave and photons move along a cycling path. However, if photons have no charge, then people should not say light is electromagnetic wave (EM wave), isn't it? Only if photons have charges, the name of EM wave can make some sense. I will say even if photons have charges, the name of EM wave is still a miss guiding. The main reason is a photon may go to a direction that nothing is before it, but a cycling electronic field makes sense only when there is another photon around that moving photon. Isn't it? Light is the main topic of my paper. I will show you how people misunderstand the light in more detail.
Overview
Presented at the 2011 Natural Philosophy Alliance meeting in College Park, Maryland, John Huang's Light and Heat begins as an essay on heat transport and grows into a book-length brief against both special and general relativity. The opening thesis is that radiation and conduction are the same thing — collisions — differing only in whether one of the colliding parties is a photon. From there Huang builds a speculative model in which everything in the universe is made of photons, then argues that the one property of photons he regards as securely established — that they all travel at the same speed in vacuum, which he abbreviates SSIV, "Same Speed In Vacuum" — is incompatible with relativistic time dilation.
The paper's departure from the mainstream is total and explicitly stated: Huang concludes that the Michelson–Morley experiment was "just a misunderstanding of rays," that the Lorentz Transformation is "correct only when v = 0," and that both relativities should be "put into history of physics" and replaced by two constructions of his own, "Distance Relativity" (DR) and "Distance Transformation" (DT). He calls Michelson–Morley and the Lorentz transformation the "two tragedies" of modern physics, both caused, in his word, by carelessness. The tone throughout is conversational and openly speculative; Huang repeatedly flags which of his own sections are "wild idea" and, in one instance, states outright that two formulas he has just derived "are definitely wrong."
The argument
Heat, cold and entropy
Huang's starting move is definitional. A hot object warms a cold one because excited electrons at the surfaces collide; a photon warms a thermometer because it collides with an electron and drives it to a higher orbit, losing frequency as it does so. Since both mechanisms are collisions, "radiation" should simply mean a collision in which one party is a photon. He adds that a thermometer reads its own temperature, not the object's, and so "normally we get a lower reading."
He then treats cooling as the same event seen from the other side: "when one party is giving heat it is getting cold." His account of entropy is that it is "the energy per degree of absolute temperature," that for two iron bars at T1 > T3 equilibrating to a common T2 the sum of the two entropy changes is always positive and zero only when T1 = T3, and that the loss arises because not all the energy leaving the hot bar goes into raising the cold one. He connects this, speculatively, to Huygens' 1665 observation that two pendulum clocks placed side by side lock into synchrony.
A photon model and a photon mass
The second part builds a photon ontology, credited in part to a 2010 comic-book treatment of Laozi's Daodejing: all matter is built from photons of two spins, which build electrons and quarks, which build nucleons and atoms. Huang calls the central property of photons "magical": when a photon's frequency changes on collision, its wavelength changes so that the product of the two is always c.
He then attempts a numerical photon mass. Supposing a photon runs at uniform speed along a spiral path of radius Rf, the Pythagorean composition of the axial and circumferential motions gives (Vf)2 = c2 + (6.28 Rf f)2. Taking the photon's energy to be entirely kinetic, E = hf = m(Vf)2/2, so m = 2hf/(Vf)2. Setting f = 1 and letting the wavelength equal the circumference (6.28 R1 = c) gives the "most reasonable result" m = h/c2, about 7×10−51 kg; the alternatives 6.28R1 = 3c and R1 = 0 give 1.4×10−51 and 1.4×10−50 kg, which he offers as the minimum and maximum.
He then derives Rf = (c/6.28)((2f−1)/f2)1/2, finds that this makes the spiral radius of green light "about 3 meters," and abandons it: "both equations of Rf listed above are definitely wrong." He keeps, however, the relation (Vf)2 = 2hf/m and a "speed cycle" in which a photon oscillates between a minimum speed c and a maximum 2Vf − c, averaging Vf. A five-force taxonomy follows — kinetic, electric, gravitational as the three basic ones, with pressure and magnetic force derived — with gravity proposed as the residue of a stronger attraction and weaker repulsion between charged photons.
SSIV against relativity
The core anti-relativistic argument is a thought experiment. Put identical evacuated boxes at the North Pole and at the equator, each counting the wave peaks of a ray of fixed wavelength L. Special relativity says the equatorial clock runs slow, so the peak counts per second differ, Fe > Fn; but with L fixed, a different count per second means a different speed of the ray, contradicting SSIV. Repeating the comparison between sea level and a mountainside at the same rotational radius produces the same conflict with general relativity. Rather than abandoning SSIV, Huang proposes to define the standard time interval as TI = (F2 − F1)L/c and to adjust atomic clocks to match it.
Distance Relativity
Huang's replacement is built entirely from light-travel time. An event at A observed from O has "visual event time" ta = tA + AO/c′, so a two-event interval is measured as (tb − ta) = (tB − tA) + (BO − AO)/c′. For collinear motion this yields t′ = (c′/(c′+v))t for recession and t′ = (c′/(c′−v))t for approach — his equations (6) and (7), "Distance Relativity" — with corresponding "visual speeds" V = c′v/(c′−v), which diverge as v → c′. He notes that a receding object looks time-dilated while an approaching one looks time-contracted, "totally different from SR."
The two tragedies
On Michelson–Morley, Huang argues that because source, mirrors and detector are all mutually at rest, no phase change should ever have been expected: the null result is trivially correct and the century of theorising built on it was misplaced. This rests on his claim that a photon emitted upward inside a moving train does not share the train's horizontal motion — it "will go upward relative to the rest universe" and land behind the emission point — which he takes to follow from the independence of light speed from source velocity.
On the Lorentz transformation, he claims to find a "missing time equation." Applying length contraction to the separation between the origins as O′ passes a point B, he obtains t′ = kt, and by symmetry t = kt′ for the inverse transformation; for both to hold, k2 = 1, hence k = 1 and v = 0. "LT is correct mathematically but useless physically." He raises parallel objections to Einstein's 1905 synchronisation definition (arguing that with a moving clock the reflection distances differ, so (t0+t2)/2 < t1 rather than equality) and to the Appendix I derivation of 1920 (arguing that combining the two light-ray relations restricts the valid domain to x = x′ = 0). A version of Herbert Dingle's clock paradox — two identical clocks circling in opposite senses and repeatedly passing close by — closes the section.
Assessment
The paper is unusually candid. Huang labels his speculative sections as such, publishes a formula and then declares it wrong, and admits several times that he does not know how to proceed. That honesty is worth something, and one of his framing observations is sound: conduction and radiation really are, at the microscopic level, both momentum-and-energy exchanges, and the pedagogical separation between them is partly conventional. His entropy statement for two bodies equilibrating is correct thermodynamics.
The arithmetic of the photon-mass section is also, checked step by step, correct. With 6.28R1 = c one gets Vf2 = 2c2 and m = h/c2 = 7.4×10−51 kg; the 3c and R1 = 0 variants give 1.5×10−51 and 1.5×10−50 kg; and the Rf formula does yield about 2.8 m for green light. His "6.283 light year per second" sweeping-ray figure and its ratio of 1.98×108 to c are likewise right.
But two things follow that the paper does not notice. First, the step "let f = 1, that means when the wavelength is c" is only meaningful in SI seconds and metres; the whole photon mass is an artefact of choosing 1 Hz as the reference frequency, and a different unit of time would give a different "constant." Second — and this is fatal — his own relation Vf2 = 2hf/m with m held constant makes the photon's speed rise as the square root of its frequency. Putting green light (f = 5.6×1014 Hz) and his own m = 7.4×10−51 kg into his own formula gives Vf ≈ 1×1016 m/s, some 3×107 times c. He nonetheless writes, three lines later, that "the value of its velocity in vacuum is a constant c." The model therefore annihilates SSIV — the single postulate on which every subsequent section, and the entire case against relativity, is built. The paper refutes itself at section 2-7-4.
The "magical character" is not magical. That wavelength times frequency equals c is the definition of wavelength for a disturbance travelling at c; it is an identity, not a discovered property requiring explanation. Similarly, "Distance Relativity" equations (6) and (7) are the classical light-travel-time (non-relativistic Doppler) factors, a standard result at least as old as Roemer, and the "unlimited visual speed" of equation (9) is the familiar apparent-superluminal effect seen in quasar jets. What distinguishes special relativity from these is precisely the extra factor of the Lorentz factor that Huang omits — and that factor is measured directly: the Ives–Stilwell experiment (1938) and its modern storage-ring successors confirm the transverse term to parts in 109, and muons in the CERN storage ring at γ = 29.3 live 29.3 times longer, in a purely circular path where his light-travel-time bookkeeping predicts nothing.
The "SSIV versus relativity" thought experiment conflates the rate of a clock with the speed of light. Both boxes measure c locally, exactly because their rulers and clocks scale together; the count of wave peaks per local second is identical, and the difference appears only when one location's clock is read from the other, which is the standard gravitational and kinematic clock comparison. That comparison is measured, not inferred: the Pound–Rebka experiment resolved a fractional shift of 2.5×10−15, Hafele–Keating flew the round-the-world clocks, and GPS would accumulate about 38 microseconds per day of error without the correction. Huang's reading of Einstein's weak-field equation (72) as predicting reversed time for a gravitational potential above "1 unit" over-extends a first-order expansion far outside its stated domain.
The Michelson–Morley argument turns on the claim that light emitted vertically in a moving frame does not carry the source's transverse motion. Independence of light speed from source velocity says nothing about direction, and the substitution of speed for velocity is where the argument goes wrong. Its prediction is also directly testable and false: a laser fixed to a bench, with the Earth moving at roughly 370 km/s relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background, would show a beam walk of order v/c ≈ 10−3 radians — more than a millimetre over a one-metre path, and varying with sidereal time. Nothing of the sort is seen; modern optical-resonator tests bound any such anisotropy below 10−17. Likewise his premise that "gravity does not change their directions of moving" is contradicted by Gravitational Lensing and by VLBI measurements of solar light deflection agreeing with general relativity to better than 0.1 per cent.
Finally, the k2 = 1 reductio assumes what it sets out to disprove. Deriving t′ = kt and t = kt′ as statements about the same pair of events requires absolute Simultaneity; in the Lorentz transformation the two relations concern different event pairs, which is exactly why the reciprocity is not a contradiction. The same assumption drives the clock-paradox section, where the symmetric counter-rotating clocks in fact agree at every meeting — as special relativity predicts by symmetry, and as rotating-clock experiments confirm. Read generously, Light and Heat is a wide-ranging set of intuitions honestly reported; read as an argument, its central postulate is destroyed by its own photon model before the argument begins.