On the nature of light - part 1

Gravity waves, I think not.

Years ago I read a book that said that Einstein had once pondered what a wave of light would look like if you were travelling along side it. Now we know that light is an electromagnetic wave that and can be described by Maxwell's equations. 

Einstein, so the story went, started looking for solutions to Maxwell's equations that would describe a stationary light wave, and found that there is none. This lead him to do some serious pondering that brought him to the Special Theory of Relativity. A serious result! For me though this was a bit of a sad ending.

For many years I have imagined light travelling through space in a kind of spiral motion and I wanted to know what would happen as I got faster and faster until I was chasing the photon at the speed of light. I know that I have mass and so I am forbidden from travelling at the speed of light, but say I was a photon and so I was a photon chasing a photon, I have always wondered what would it look like. In addition to looking at the photon ahead of me, what would I see if I actually stopped and had a look at the universe

Now I know there is no point in going back to Maxwell's equations because Einstein, a far finer mind than my own, had already been there and discovered there was nothing doing. So that was out, then I got thinking about Louis be Broglie. I have always had a soft spot for de Broglie if only because a physics teacher of mine was really jealous of this guy for some reason I never understood. 

Louis came up with the idea of wave-particle duality, giving us this equation

where
is the wavelength,
is the Planck's constant,
is the momentum,
is the rest mass, 
is the velocity
is the speed of light in a vacuum. 

If we consider a photon, the value of   is  and so the equation brakes down since   becomes zero. If your maths is a little weak, this is because the last part of the equation, the  /  part becomes 1, and 1 - 1 = 0, and anything multiplied by zero is zero. So   becomes zero. 

We know that electrons can behave like waves and photons can behave like particles.

So back to my photon, I think that if I am travelling at the speed of light directly behind my friend the photon I see the photon as a type of standing wave. If the wave is travelling in the x direction then the standing wave exists in the y/z plane.

Conventional thinking is that the magnetic field induces an electric field and the electric field in turn induces the magnetic field and it is by this mutual induction that the photon travels through space (see equations 2 & 4 below for the mathematical representation of this sentence!). This seems to be the way, but I can't help thinking there is more to it than this and I'll explain why I think this.

Gravity.

We know, from experiment no less, that light can be bent when it passes by a star. This was what pushed Einstein to public fame because he had predicted this. The light bends because space time is bent and light just travel along the most direct route. This is gravity at work.

Fine, but here is the thing I think that light as an additional component to the electric and magnetic fields. I think there is another component, gravity.

I have several reasons for thinking this, though the first is that gravity waves, if they exist, travel at the speed of light. Just like light. I just find it too coincidental that gravity waves and light waves both travel at the speed of light. Now you can argue that the theory of  general relativity is derived using the speed of light as a constant and that the speed of gravity waves comes out of this. I would turn this around and say that the reason gravity waves travel at the speed of light is that they are actually a component of light.

Gravity waves have never been detected, I find this amazing given the amount of effort that has gone into actually finding these fellas. Maybe we are looking in the wrong location and in the wrong way. I think that there are gravity waves but they are different to what we actually think. More on this in the next post.

So Maxwell's equations, now I know I said that I was not going to go anywhere near these. After all, finer minds than mine have already gone down this road and found it a dead end, but I can't help thinking I just need to take a quick look.

Let's consider the Maxwell equations for an electro magnetic wave in free space. It goes something like this,

don't worry about the meaning of these at the moment, we will cover them in the next post. My point in actually listing them is so that I can point out that there is something else. See I think there is an extra term that needs to be added to these equations to represent gravity.

But! I hear you cry, photons, don't have mass, so it doesn't make sense to even consider gravity here. I think this is were we have are going wrong, and in the next post on the nature of light, I'll show you why.

To finish this post though I want to point out a few "similarities" between gravity (G) and electromagnetism (EM).

EM - Coulomb's law. F = qE
G - Newton's law F = ma

G and EM both act in a vacuum
Both obey the inverse square law (more on this next time, suffice to say they both have an inverse square law).

True there are a number of differences.

Gravity is always attractive, particles with similar charge repel each other.
Electromagnetic forces are considerably larger than gravity IF we compare the electro static repulsion of two electrons with the gravitational attraction, based on existing theories.

I think we need to explain the differences and also explain the similarities, and this I will try to do in my next post.

Coming soon to a cinema near you!