The dark side of light: negative frequency photons • Hacker News Board

Re: The dark side of light: negative frequency photons

#51

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 12:59 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #48

gus_massa wrote: post #40

I read the original article that is much clearer about the details ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4429424 ). My explanation of the effect is long a bit technical. I hope that it is intelligible. (To keep this simple, I will ignore the phases of the waves.) * * * Complex notation: First, the equation for the electric field of the light is E = A cos(kz-wt) It's more convenient to write it as a sum of complex exp…

At times like this I think it's a shame that HN doesn't support TeX formatting. It's much easier to follow a mathematical argument with proper notation.

mathbin.net

Re: The dark side of light: negative frequency photons

#52

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 1:04 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #47

jblow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The surprising thing is that the models generate predictions far beyond the domains they were designed for (and far beyond the original knowledge of the people making the models), and that the predictions are so mindbogglingly accurate that there seems to be Something Else going on. See the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics link below.

> The surprising thing is that the models generate predictions far beyond the domains they were designed for (and far beyond the original knowledge of the people making the models), and that the predictions are so mindbogglingly accurate that there seems to be Something Else going on. Yes -- and I can't resist citing antimatter as a perfect example. Dirac's Equation had two symmetrical results (sort of like a quadrat…

But in the end antimatter didn't have negative energy anyway?

Re: The dark side of light: negative frequency photons

#53

Post by lutusp » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 4:10 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #51

lutusp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At times like this I think it's a shame that HN doesn't support TeX formatting. It's much easier to follow a mathematical argument with proper notation.

mathbin.net

Yes, or any image archive, with appropriate homework in advance of posting. Or an online LaTeX editor like mine:

http://arachnoid.com/latex

But better, there are some very low-impact JavaScript utilities like MathJax:

http://www.mathjax.org/

Which allow a pretty seamless interleaving of LaTeX and normal content within a page. Within a submission one need only enclose the LaTeX content in unique delimiters, like the often-used $$double-dollar-signs$$.

All this because W3C can't seem to agree on a standard way to render mathematics in the browser itself -- or more to the point, get the browser builders to agree to anything they've proposed.

Re: The dark side of light: negative frequency photons

#54

Post by lutusp » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #52

lutusp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The surprising thing is that the models generate predictions far beyond the domains they were designed for (and far beyond the original knowledge of the people making the models), and that the predictions are so mindbogglingly accurate that there seems to be Something Else going on. Yes -- and I can't resist citing antimatter as a perfect example. Dirac's Equation had two symmetrical results (sort of like a quadrat…

But in the end antimatter didn't have negative energy anyway?

Yes, true, the term "antimatter" has always been somewhat of a misnomer. "Antimatter" differs from matter in a number of ways, but there's only one kind of gravitational mass-energy.