Thank you for this explanation, it includes exactly the sort of mechanical explanations I was looking for. Not necessarily simple or easy to understand, but about entities with certain properties interacting in certain ways.
When I accelerate the electrons, the virtual photons that they spat out a few nanoseconds ago (messengers for their electric field) are 'unable to return home' (home having moved) and must find something else to do; the something else is to interact with other particles, which we measure as a magnetic field.
For example, this is a mechanical explanation. It's probably somewhat inaccurate due to being expressed verbally, but a person can then turn to the equations to get the detailed, accurate picture.
I often see this sort of confusion in the way basic physics is taught; because the equations are the full description of what's going on, people expect them also to contain the full understanding at the causal level.
I think I would have done so much better in physics if they had explained the causality with the equations. For me, now, understanding that light is the interaction of the electric and magnetic fields has been a wonderful paradigm shift in way I view things. I had already assimilated that most things I experience are electrostatic -- that a table is non-compressible and the chair supports me because of electrons and their interactions. And now my idea of light has changed -- I no longer see it as an independent substance reaching me, but as information about the change in an electric field propagating towards me at a fixed speed from whatever sources are emitting or reflecting the light.
My ideas are topsy-turvy at the moment, it will take some time and reading for them to settle in any accurate way. But I'll share some of my first-day thoughts . For example: A room full of light is 'bright' because the light contains so much information. And: it seems amazing that visible light is so faithful (non-noisy) when you think of it as a wave propagating in all directions; only a particle at the moment of observation.
A room full of light is 'bright' because the light contains so much information. And: it seems amazing that visible light is so faithful (non-noisy) when you think of it as a wave propagating in all directions; only a particle at the moment of observation.
I find that your bright room-observation and an analogy with low-light photography almost helps me grasp how come the world seems classical despite its quantum “underwear”:
Think of a (digital) photograph taken in very low light. Something like this.
Think of being in a pitch black room, and imagine your...
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Collapse Postulates
In the olden days of physics, circa 1900, many prominent physicists believed in a substance known as aether. The principle was simple: Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism had shown that light was a wave, and light followed many of the same equations as sound waves and water waves. However, every other kind of wave- sound waves, water waves, waves in springs- needs some sort of medium for its transmission. A "wave" is not really a physical object; it is just a disturbance of some other substance. For instance, if you throw a rock into a pond, you cannot pluck the waves out of the pond and take them home with you in your backpack, because the "waves" are just peaks and troughs in the puddle of water (the medium). Hence, there should be some sort of medium for light waves, and the physicists named this medium "aether".
However, difficulties soon developed. If you have a jar, you can pump the air out of the jar, and then the jar will no longer transmit sound, demonstrating that the wave medium (the air) has been removed. But, there was no way to remove the aether from a jar; no matter what the experimentalists did, you could still shine light through it. There was, in fact, no way of detecting, altering, or experimenting with aether at all. Physicists knew that aether must be unlike all other matter, because it could apparently pass through closed containers made of any substance. And finally, the Michelson-Morely experiment showed that the "aether" was always stationary relative to Earth, even though the Earth changed direction every six months as it moved about in its orbit! Shortly thereafter, the inconsistencies were resolved with Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and everyone realized that aether was imaginary.
Shortly thereafter, during the 20th century, physicists discovered two new forces of nature: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These two forces, as well as electromagnetism, could be described very well on the quantum level: they were created by the influence of mediator particles called (respectively) gluons, W and Z bosons, and photons, and these particles obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics just like electrons and mesons did. The description of these three forces, as well as the particles they act upon, has been neatly unified in a theory of physics known as the Standard Model, which has been our best known description of the universe for thirty years now.
However, gravity is not a part of this model. Making an analogy to the other forces, physicists have proposed a mediator particle known as the "graviton". The graviton is thought to be similar to the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z bosons, except that it is massless and has spin 2. I posit that the "graviton" is essentially the same theory as the "aether": a misguided attempt to explain something by reference to similar-seeming things that were explained in the same way. Consider the following facts:
And, with reference to the graviton itself:
So, what's really going on here? I don't know. I'm not Albert Einstein. But I suspect it will take someone like him- someone brilliant, very good at physics, yet largely outside the academic system- to resolve this mess, and tell us what's really happening.