It's a little invasive, I know, but are you down for a wee bit of brain picking, C C? Because I…am…stuck.
I can’t wrap my head around the anatomy of a shadow. According to almost every physicist, darkness is not an entity. A shadow is just a cross-section of a three-dimensional region. A shadow changes shape when newly unblocked light fills the previous gap. That’s all a shadow is…a gap. A shadow doesn’t travel at all. It’s an illusion because we tend to think that a shadow is a physical thing but it is just the lack of physical things.
If we keep it somewhat simple and think about a plane wave solution,
the B field is associated with the E field. One is the other. One cannot exist without the other. If you compare the two, several things hold. You see that the magnitude of the B field is c times lower than the magnitude of the E field. The E and B field are in phase. That means that if one reaches the maximum the other reaches the maximum at the same time. And if one is zero, the other is zero. B is perpendicular to E because E is in the X direction and B is in the y direction. Each one is perpendicular to the z direction. If one reaches zero, the other reaches zero, but you are allowed to change the phase, e.g., elliptically polarized radiation where the E field is now in the y and x direction. When the E0x is at the maximum, the E0y is zero and vice versa. So, now there is never a moment when the E vector is zero. The E vector now rotates around in an ellipse. It’s elliptically polarized radiation. It’s a perfect solution to Maxwell’s equations. You have one component in the x direction and the other in the y direction and you offset them by 90 degrees. You can make the angle any value that you want to. If E0y is the same as E0x then it’s a circle. It can go clockwise or counterclockwise. And of course, the B field is associated and always the same as the E field. This is a simple description in 2D but if you add another dimension in the k direction, the E and B fields will still always remain the same. In 2D ky was simply kz. Ky was zero and Kx was zero because it was only going in the z direction. If the xy plane is going in the direction perpendicular to the direction of k, the distance of the E fields is the wavelength, but if you look at the wave in the y-axis, where this wave interacts, the distance is way larger than lambda, and the same is true for the x direction, and also, in the z direction. It moves at the speed of c but in the crest in the k direction that's in the y direction moves faster than c, which we call the phase velocity in the y direction. This pattern moves faster than the speed of light and it can be very larger. This does not in any way violate relativity because no energy will flow with that speed. Something similar can happen with water. The distance between arrival time between point a and b for wave one and two is simply lambda, which of course is dependent upon the angle.
This sounds all well and good but the part that’s bothering me is deconstructive interference. A more accurate theory of electromagnetic waves characterizes the flow of energy via the Poynting vector S = E × H. If they’re correct and the constructive interference doubles the magnetic energy destroying the electric energy but given that the B and E fields are one in the same, then darkness might take on some form of an entity, a region of transformation, perhaps. Albeit, a larger distance than lambda but nevertheless, a traveling entity.
If the B and E fields are one in the same, the gap, i.e., deconstructive interference (dark bands and fringes) may reach zero at a certain point in time but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how we could call this type of darkness a non-entity.
We might be able to think of a shadow or darkness in color mixing and subtracting in a way that’s very similar to the blister effect.
From a laywoman’s perspective, if darkness was a non-entity and didn’t move, it wouldn’t refract or reflect and according to the conventional understanding, it doesn’t. If that’s the case, (and here’s my admittingly naïve question) how is it displaced? When you look through a prism or any lens, everything is displaced including the blocked areas, black areas, and shadow areas. I don’t get it.
(Dec 13, 2019 05:47 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: It's a little invasive, I know, but are you down for a wee bit of brain picking, C C? Because I…am…stuck.
I can’t wrap my head around the anatomy of a shadow. According to almost every physicist, darkness is not an entity. A shadow is just a cross-section of a three-dimensional region. A shadow changes shape when newly unblocked light fills the previous gap. That’s all a shadow is…a gap. A shadow doesn’t travel at all. It’s an illusion because we tend to think that a shadow is a physical thing but it is just the lack of physical things. [...] the gap, i.e., deconstructive interference (dark bands and fringes) may reach zero at a certain point in time but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how we could call this type of darkness a non-entity.
I'm not sure there are any additional elaborations that could provide a revelatory insight equivalent to Nature itself standing up in court and affirming that _X_ indeed is or is not an entity. IOW, declarations of "absence" not being treated as an entity are not universal/absolute. But apply to the field or sub-field of endeavor making those pronouncements. (I wish I could plant the first paragraph in the next quote section immediately after this to clarify the latter, but it would distract from the following that pertains to the former.)
For instance: In semiconductor electronics, missing electrons or "empty slots" where they could otherwise be in atomic structure can be pragmatically treated as if they are "entities" called holes. This children's puzzle game is sported as an example of how absence can be treated as a mobile thing.
Quasiparticles don't concern absence, but they do involve the unusual bent of conceiving and technically describing certain group behavior of excitations in a medium as if they're a particle or object.
Shifting to interference patterns transpiring in water, there's obviously a macroscopic "entity" there that both the disturbances and the perceptually conceived dark areas are "riding on", namely the water itself.
It sounds like you might at least be grazing the philosophical territory of the problem of holes and voids. Though I'd call them perceptual emptiness or discontinuations of the surrounding substrate slash properties/features making them possible, rather than a literal "lack of anything".
Achille C. Varzi (Doughnuts): . . . We thus come to the moral of our little exercise. The interplay between holes and their hosts—between void and matter—can be very complex indeed. And the only way to address it properly and in a systematic way is to grant equal dignity to both characters: the void and the matter. Now, this means we must be very serious about reifying holes. We must be very serious about treating them as fully fledged entities, on a par with the material objects that surround them. And as with all cases of void reification, this may carry in its wake an array of difficult philosophical conundrums. [...] One could still try to do away with such nothings by relying on richer representation systems. [...] But that is the unavoidable boomerang effect of such an eliminative strategy. For this is the dilemma of every eliminative strategy: [...] if successful, it ends up eliminating everything just in order to eliminate nothings.
Quote:According to almost every physicist, darkness is not an entity.
That would be both my expectation and expectation of their response, but to jump out to a broader stance of what's going on... If so, the short story is that it's simply how a particular system of understanding and representation has chosen to conceive and classify its affairs (specifically shadows or patches of darkness, in this case). And if working within it, you just go along with their nomenclature and interpretative approach. Since doing otherwise means a vast detour into the much bigger task of challenging their whole taxonomic template or underlying philosophical guidelines and presuppositions for operation. In some cases, there may not even be any coherent, underlying logic in a discipline or profession's distinction-making and identification methods -- just the momentum of a set of customs its founders common-sense wise took up in the beginning or along the history of its development without ever critically examining or justifying how such held together.
Physics is akin to a "game" playing within its own rules, and it's going to have incommensurabilities with other knowledge views and enterprises. The joints in even its own framework are not going to align perfectly, much less fit flawlessly with the empirical reality it's trying to convert to abstraction. It will have these ontological issues cropping up that only those in a metascience or philosophy of physics want to spin wheels on in undying attempts to tie-up the loose ends and ragged junctions.
(Dec 13, 2019 05:47 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: It's a little invasive, I know, but are you down for a wee bit of brain picking, C C? Because I…am…stuck.
I can’t wrap my head around the anatomy of a shadow. According to almost every physicist, darkness is not an entity. A shadow is just a cross-section of a three-dimensional region. A shadow changes shape when newly unblocked light fills the previous gap. That’s all a shadow is…a gap. A shadow doesn’t travel at all. It’s an illusion because we tend to think that a shadow is a physical thing but it is just the lack of physical things. [...] the gap, i.e., deconstructive interference (dark bands and fringes) may reach zero at a certain point in time but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how we could call this type of darkness a non-entity.
I'm not sure there are any additional elaborations that could provide a revelatory insight equivalent to Nature itself standing up in court and affirming that _X_ indeed is or is not an entity. IOW, declarations of "absence" not being treated as an entity are not universal/absolute. But apply to the field or sub-field of endeavor making those pronouncements. (I wish I could plant the first paragraph in the next quote section immediately after this to clarify the latter, but it would distract from the following that pertains to the former.)
For instance: In semiconductor electronics, missing electrons or "empty slots" where they could otherwise be in atomic structure can be pragmatically treated as if they are "entities" called holes. This children's puzzle game is sported as an example of how absence can be treated as a mobile thing.
Quasiparticles don't concern absence, but they do involve the unusual bent of conceiving and technically describing certain group behavior of excitations in a medium as if they're a particle or object.
Shifting to interference patterns transpiring in water, there's obviously a macroscopic "entity" there that both the disturbances and the perceptually conceived dark areas are "riding on", namely the water itself.
It sounds like you might at least be grazing the philosophical territory of the problem of holes and voids. Though I'd call them perceptual emptiness or discontinuations of the surrounding substrate slash properties/features making them possible, rather than a literal "lack of anything".
Achille C. Varzi (Doughnuts): . . . We thus come to the moral of our little exercise. The interplay between holes and their hosts—between void and matter—can be very complex indeed. And the only way to address it properly and in a systematic way is to grant equal dignity to both characters: the void and the matter. Now, this means we must be very serious about reifying holes. We must be very serious about treating them as fully fledged entities, on a par with the material objects that surround them. And as with all cases of void reification, this may carry in its wake an array of difficult philosophical conundrums. [...] One could still try to do away with such nothings by relying on richer representation systems. [...] But that is the unavoidable boomerang effect of such an eliminative strategy. For this is the dilemma of every eliminative strategy: [...] if successful, it ends up eliminating everything just in order to eliminate nothings.
Quote:According to almost every physicist, darkness is not an entity.
That would be both my expectation and expectation of their response, but to jump out to a broader stance of what's going on... If so, the short story is that it's simply how a particular system of understanding and representation has chosen to conceive and classify its affairs (specifically shadows or patches of darkness, in this case). And if working within it, you just go along with their nomenclature and interpretative approach. Since doing otherwise means a vast detour into the much bigger task of challenging their whole taxonomic template or underlying philosophical guidelines and presuppositions for operation. In some cases, there may not even be any coherent, underlying logic in a discipline or profession's distinction-making and identification methods -- just the momentum of a set of customs its founders common-sense wise took up in the beginning or along the history of its development without ever critically examining or justifying how such held together.
Physics is akin to a "game" playing within its own rules, and it's going to have incommensurabilities with other knowledge views and enterprises. The joints in even its own framework are not going to align perfectly, much less fit flawlessly with the empirical reality it's trying to convert to abstraction. It will have these ontological issues cropping up that only those in a metascience or philosophy of physics want to spin wheels on in undying attempts to tie-up the loose ends and ragged junctions.
Well said, C C. Similar to virtual particles, I suppose.
It's still going to be difficult to sooth the savage beast (curiosity).
Most people don’t have a prism on hand but the acrylic ones are really cheap. If you look at this picture through a prism towards one direction, the colors will diverge (defract) even more but towards the other, they'll line up and overlap.
In addition to the reversed spectrum, you have to remember that the light coming from the white page will obviously affect the outcome. Take a look at the Bayer patterns, for example. You’ll notice that when the white from the page itself diffracts, the blue will enter the green areas to create cyan and in the opposite direction, in the red you'll see magenta. You'll also notice newly created black lines.
While I absolutely love the idea of a new C C color theory. I think I—am—wrong! I don’t think it has anything to do with deconstructive interference. On the contrary, the deconstructive interference is what creates the colors, not the other way around.
Side note…
My son has a fight here in California a few days before he starts college in another state. So, I’m going to drive his truck down and let him fly down. This summer, he found a four-leaf clover in our favorite forest. The odds are 5,000 to 1. I pressed it and I put it in a frame for a housewarming gift with this quote.
"Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality."
Pehr Sallstrom and his friends may be physicists but I think they’re looking at this all wrong. Just my laywoman’s opinion, of course, but nevertheless, he says, "that the two spectra are complementary in the sense that if they are superimposed that is, if they are produced in such a way that they appear at the same place, the result will be either just white or just black."
I think what Sallstrom, and many others like him are missing is that color is created through light and lack of. Maybe that’s the one thing that Goethe was right about.
I think I’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Perhaps this is best explained by colored shadows.
I do believe that this explanation is incorrect, though. I don’t think that the red, green and blue areas are due to his hand blocking the other colors from getting to this spot.
He says, "Let’s focus on the spot where we see the red shadow. My hand blocks the green and blue from getting to this spot, so the red light is the only remaining light that hits this portion of the screen and is reflected back to our eyes." He says the same thing for the green and blue. However, magenta and yellow create the red, cyan and magenta create the blue, and yellow and cyan create the green. The black is where all the light is blocked.
Sallstrom’s tried to demonstate a perfect inversion of Isaak Newton's Experimentum Crusis with his monochromatic rays of shadows. His experiment not only consisted of smoke and mirrors, as it turns out, it was just smoke and mirrors.
C CDec 17, 2019 07:46 PM (This post was last modified: Dec 17, 2019 08:09 PM by C C.)
Oh, geez, why can't I just stick with "Whereof we cannot speak [because of the wreck to sort out at the railroad tracks] we must remain silent" that might still be the best, late policy.
But the recent turn to "not having anything to do with deconstructive interference" is making me reconsider that maybe the train wreck in communication is not completely unresolvable. This was the reply I was going to post Sunday night, but just gave up in the end.
(Dec 15, 2019 06:53 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: .. . However, you'll have to keep in mind that when looking through a prism the spectrum is reversed.
In addition to the reversed spectrum, you have to remember that the light coming from the white page will obviously affect the outcome. Take a look at the Bayer patterns, for example. You’ll notice that when the white from the page itself diffracts, the blue will enter the green areas to create cyan. If you look at the patterns through the opposite angles, you'll also notice newly created black lines.
SS, are the black lines in spectral patterns what are being construed as the result of colors supposedly mixing to produce black? Black lines or absorption lines are the result of interactions with matter beforehand. The "black" or absence doesn't fall out of color mixing or pure wavelength blending/encounters (i.e., minus "atoms/molecules"). Are you referencing some other manner of black lines either here and elsewhere -- is that what I've been missing when it comes to these shifts to prisms?
Quote:Most people don’t have a prism on hand but the acrylic ones are really cheap. If you look at this picture through a prism towards one direction, the colors will diverge (defract) even more but towards the other, they'll line up and overlap.
For the sake of going down this (apparent or seeming???) path... of colors produced by dispersion... and AFTER THAT... (???) being treated as a situation equivalent to color mixing in the context of emission...
Other color mixing combinations besides RGB can supposedly be used in the emission category (including CMY). But those alternatives aren't as effective, and they're additive in that context just like RGB. (CMY color primaries would no longer be associated with the subtractive approach to color mixing if transplanted from reflection to emission production of color.)
Black in association with (emission) additive color mixing results is just absence -- not a combination of colors. Subtraction in the reflection category yields absence, too, because the absorbing is done by the chemicals (not by visible light, or photons in isolation from matter). The substances have to include an extra one (enhanced CMYK system) that absorbs "all" visible wavelengths, though, since the inks, dyes, etc corresponding to CMY can't adequately accomplish that alone.
The combo of constructive and destructive interactions of waves in the interference category don't apply to emission and reflection. That's why it's a jump to a different context and the (????) that follow for me like a non sequitur when that occurs.
But our visual system can supply "black" for our mental representations (perceptions) if there's actually insufficient absence of visible emitted or reflected light with regard to a source or material "out there". When our eyes/nervous system's processing is either fooled or biased to introduce such in particular areas of a scene for its own _X_ reasons.
For instance: Back in the days of analog television, I remember a NOVA episode or else something from a BBC program pointing out how the phosphor coating screens of old B&W television sets weren't black at all. And yet when a video checkerboard pattern was shown on them the dark squares did appear as black as midnight. The absence of activity in those spots should have just consisted of the blank phosphor coating showing through the scene, which was not black. But the human visual system was supplying a deep "absence" as if black was either a color or a negative magnitude that needed to contrast with level of the "glowing square" parts of the screen that appeared white.
When some people experience _X_ and others don't, it highlights all the more an optical illusion being involved. For instance. I would apparently have belonged in the proposed 50% that didn't experience color in the B&W commercials below.
(Dec 17, 2019 06:10 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: While I absolutely love the idea of a new C C color theory. I think I—am—wrong! I don’t think it has anything to do with deconstructive interference. On the contrary, the deconstructive interference is what creates the colors, not the other way around.
If "it" involved the emission category for the production of color that the guy in the video seems to be engaging in, then the statement "I don’t think it has anything to do with deconstructive interference" would be on target. In which case (if it did abide in that context), just stop right there, or broaden slightly to it not have anything to with the interference category. Nor does the reflection category (of subtractive color mixing) conflate with interference in terms of what's going on.
Quote:Side note…
My son has a fight here in California a few days before he starts college in another state. So, I’m going to drive his truck down and let him fly down. This summer, he found a four-leaf clover in our favorite forest. The odds are 5,000 to 1. I pressed it and I put it in a frame for a housewarming gift with this quote.
"Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality."
Wish him good luck with the event. That is amazing with the clover.
(Dec 17, 2019 07:46 PM)C C Wrote: Oh, geez, why can't I just stick with "Whereof we cannot speak [because of the wreck to sort out at the railroad tracks] we must remain silent" that might still be the best, late policy.
Yeah, dangit! As I was climbing out of the hole, you dragged me back down.
C C Wrote:SS, are the black lines in spectral patterns what are being construed as the result of colors supposedly mixing to produce black? Black lines or absorption lines are the result of interactions with matter beforehand. The "black" or absence doesn't fall out of color mixing or pure wavelength blending/encounters (i.e., minus "atoms/molecules"). Are you referencing some other manner of black lines either here and elsewhere -- is that what I've been missing when it comes to these shifts to prisms?
Geez, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe that is what I'm seeing. I never even thought about that. What I was trying to get at with Sallstom's example was the his spectrum was created by blocking the light and superimposing them would simply line up the area where there was no light. But maybe you're right and the black line that I'm seeing is a spectral line. Let me show you.
As I said earlier, if you look in one direction they’ll just continue to separate but they’ll overlap in the opposite direct. As they separate or overlap, the background does make a huge difference, and obviously, some will refract more than others, depending upon the wavelength and thickness of the glass. For instance, when yellow spreads out, you’ll notice a faint trace of pink left behind. If it’s next to the cyan and they overlap, you’ll see green. When it gets to the point that it overlaps with magenta, you’ll see red. As you adjust your angle or distance of focus, you can see the relationship of all the colors or so I thought. It will get to the point when magenta will overlap with red creating blue and yellow will overlap with red creating green and eventually they will all overlap and the line will appear black.
Here’s a photo of this image as they overlap through a prism.
Complementary colors are pairs of colors which, when combined or mixed, cancel each other out (lose hue) by producing a grayscale color like white or black. I superimposed these this with the transparency set at 40%.
It’s said that this whole process is similar to a negative. So…maybe instead of a red herring it’s an Edwal Hering.
I don't know. Maybe you're right. Maybe the black line that I'm seeing is just a spectral line. At this point, your guess is as good as mine.
C C Wrote:When some people experience _X_ and others don't, it highlights all the more an optical illusion being involved. For instance. I would apparently have belonged in the proposed 50% that didn't experience color in the B&W commercials below.
I'll return either in January or a few days before, SS. When hopefully I'm no longer distracted by fidgety clients, protests of North Pole militants, and appeasing the ritual expectations of domestic and incoming tribal folk. Always had a limit to multitasking, too many interruptions to focus on anything. Giving up even finding a break to read and post what's transpiring in the world of research, thought, and politics. Best wishes and a merry abandonment of sanity to all in the ensuing daze.
Dec 13, 2019 05:47 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 13, 2019 08:17 PM by Secular Sanity.)
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