The first thing we need to make absolutely clear is that these are the types of questions of Physics that most laymen want answers to and never get. They naïvely ask such questions in Quora with the futile hope that an expert will respond, but the people who apply for the job are mathematicians who deceptively style themselves as ‘physicists’.
mathematical ‘physicist’: 1. an individual who cannot and does not answer WHY (mechanism, cause) questions; 2. an individual who dismisses questions of Physics as ‘philosophy’
Synonyms: mathematician, mathemagician, non-physicist
This leads us to a perplexing second issue: Why did the non-physicist even attempt to answer a qualitative, cause/mechanism type of question if he freely concedes that it’s not part of his job description? If the mathematicians believe that the job of a ‘physicist’ is circumscribed to inventing or discovering equations, in other words, to merely measuring and describing relations, why did they even apply for the job? To make matters worse, they begin or end their dissertations by brushing aside WHY questions as petty ‘philosophy’?
Let’s make it clear: the job of a genuine physicist is indeed to answer WHY – causes and mechanisms – types of questions. It is the mathematicians who took over the guild since the days of Galileo and Newton who led the world to believe that Physics = Math and that science is about describing rather than about explaining.
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The constant speed of light
Light ‘travels’ at a constant speed between any two atoms irrespective of the medium the atoms form a part of. It doesn’t matter if one atom is a component of air, the next one part of a wall, and a third one swims in a liquid. Light ALWAYS ‘travels’ at 300,000 km/s… because light does not travel at all. The notion of ‘traveling’ comes from misguided mathematicians who for 3,000 years now have simulated light with discrete particles, today known as photons. Even the infamous transverse wave that non-physicists such as Fresnel and Maxwell championed were ultimately made of discrete corpuscles, and both waves and particles are to this day imagined as moving in a single direction.
Of course, if waves and particles can only travel one way, the inevitable follow up question is: Why can’t light travel faster or slower? What physical impediment is there for light to change speeds?
The mathematicians have measured light ad nauseam and eventually figured out the mathematical description: c = ƒ λ . The constant speed of light is an inverse relation between frequency and wavelength (i.e., 300,000 km/s = frequency * wavelength). It is the job of an authentic physicist to tell you WHY. And of course, a mathematician cannot explain the cause underlying this fixed speed with one way corpuscles. It is then that these amateur ‘physicists’ invented an irrational discipline known as Quantum Mechanics where the classical corpuscle morphed into a mathematical concept: a number called photon.
Quantum ‘Mechanics’: measurements + quantitative descriptions + irrational mechanics
If, instead, we simulate the invisible, intangible mediator of light with an entity that has the architecture of a DNA-like rope, we can understand why the speed of light cannot have a rate other than constant. Let’s make that assumption. We assume that all atoms are physically interconnected by a pair of invisible, intangible threads. An object is not that which can be seen or touched because not all objects can be seen or touched. An object is that which has shape. For any length of this elongated object, the number of links WILL be inversely proportional to the length of each link:
c = ƒ λ = number of links * length of the link
Take any rope. Count the number of links. Torque it a couple of times. The number of links should be greater and each link should be shorter. End of story! Now you understand why the speed of light is constant throughout the Universe. The Particle Hypothesis of Classical and Quantum Mechanics suffers sudden death.
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Why the speed of light is not added to the speed of the flashlight
The Quantum atom is an even more irrational proposal of Mathematical ‘physics’. After a hundred years, non-physicists still use the amusing Rutherford-Bohr planetary atom to simulate poorly understood phenomena such as ionization, electricity, and Quantum jump. And after hundred years the mathematicians still cannot tell you WHY (cause/mechanism) the electron bead does not fall to the nucleus or escape the atom altogether. The mathematicians who call themselves ‘physicists’ cannot rationalize the physical workings of the Quantum atom, from quarks and gluons to electrons and neutrons.
Under the rope model of light, the atom is itself weaved by the same threads that make up the mediating rope. One thread goes straight to the center of the atom. One thread from every rope in existence converges upon our atom and constructs the proton star. The other thread of each rope curves around and forms the encapsulating electron shell.
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