How did Einstein arrive at E=mc^2?

Saint, I think you make a lot of sense. It takes time to process though.

Ah, I thought this was what pair-production was about.

my question then becomes: how does what precisely (in physical terms?) arrive at the c^2.5 factor?

An electron is extremely small compared to a photon, so don’t go thinking in terms of merely a couple of photons spinning around each other and forming an electron. Just because you get photons formed after you breakup an electron, doesn’t mean there were tiny little photons inside just waiting to puff up and be free.

In pair production you start with a photon and “split it” into two to make an electron and a positron. If you annihilate an electron with a positron you typically get two photons. Think of the electron as one photon going round and round, and the positron as another.

I can’t tell you I’m afraid. I saw it in a draft paper, and I promised I wouldn’t reveal any details until after the paper is published. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the 2.5.

The photon is a wave, it doesn’t really have a size, like that picture you put up where you mentioned standard deviations. The electron has a wavelike nature, it doesn’t really have a size either. The smallness that people talk about it something like the smallness of the eye of a storm. Think of the electron’s electromagnetic field as being “part of what it is”.

James & Farsight, I can’t make sense of your texts together. They seem to contradict.

Farsight - if one foton becomes an electron and a positron, why do the latter two when they collide or merge become two fotons? Could these fotons then also be merged again into one “heavier” foton?

Well, thanks anyway, I’d hate to be straining myself to understand things that aren’t even so.

What’s New;

They shouldn’t. There will be some differences in the language and the detail, but it’s the same general picture.

It’s a bit like two opposite knots cancelling each others’ knottedness to free up the photon that’s configured as an electron and the photon that’s configured as the positron. Yes, you can merge two photons to create one photon with half the wavelength. At least I think you can. You can definitely split a photon into two photons with double the wavelength, and most things in physics are reversible because they’re just wavefunction configuration changes.

No probs. When I can tell you, you’ll appreciate that It’s horribly simple.

I don’t understand. Can such a rationale not produce justification for any formula? If values on both sides of the equation are zero, how much can this imply?

In what way do you mean “small”? I don’t so much think in terms of spatial size with these things, rather in quantum of energy. I thought you meant the electrons quantum of energy is small compared to the photons - where I thought the energy of one form becomes the energy of another.

What are the minimum and maximum electrical charges of a photon and of an electron?

In physics, photons don’t have charge and an electron has (amazingly) exactly 1 electron volt.
{{ seems suspiciously like Intelligent Design to me…hmm…}}

Sorry for continuing to ask silly questions James (I got that Joule-joke the first time though)
I am just curious as to the type of changes that happen between an electron and a photon.

How does the energy of a photon amount to electrical charge in an electron? What exactly is electrical charge?

Well, before I get into another lengthy and boring lecture on Rational Metaphysics, I need to know whether, when speaking to me, you are asking of the physics or of the Truth. Physics can only determine measurements between the measured. Science is an effort to reverse engineer nature using nature. Rational Metaphysics is the mental engineering of nature taken from the Genesis approach, starting from “nothing” and building up to what can be measured.

But then realize also that Rational Metaphysics is a mountain growing from under the sea (“subspace”) and hasn’t yet reached the surface where it meets the theories of Science and can be clearly seen.

In physics, electric charge is simply the attraction between positive and negative particles. That attraction constitutes a “field” involving distance and volume. Physics can’t tell you why anything is so, but only that it is so (after they give “names to the creatures/creations of the field”). They give you the names and their distinction from the other named creations. Rational Metaphysics gets into exactly why they are positive or negative and why they attract but such is a much more complicated explanation and not entirely ready for display (reached the surface of the sea).

It doesn’t. A photon might have an energy of 0.511MeV, which is the “rest energy” of an electron, but the photon has zero charge, whilst the electron charge is −1.602×10^−19 Coulombs. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron#F … properties. Energy and charge are different.

It’s a “standing electromagnetic field variation” with a particular disposition. The photon or electromagnetic wave is an electromagnetic field variation that goes past you at c. The field variation is sinusoidal, with a positive followed by a negative. If you fix this so that it’s going round and round in a stable configuration where the negative field variation is on the outside, what you’ve got is a negatively charged particle.

If you want to get more fundamental, the electromagnetic wave is a wave of displacement current. A charged particle is where you’ve got an isotropic all-round spatial displacement which diminishes with distance.

In the end thats what Im interested in.

Great to hear that it’s progressing toward the surface.

Wow, that’s a great explanation. From my perspective very useful, at least. If this means that we could (if we were to distinguish categories “force” and “form”) classify electrical charge in the category of form.
That sheds a new light on the compatibility of positive and negative charges.

Is there an analogous explanation for a positive charge?

Thanks Jakob. One of the reasons I talk on forums is to try to hone the descriptions to get them as brief and clear and robust as possible. It’s nice to get some feedback that says I’m hitting the mark.

I guess so. I probably would have said geometry, but that’s “form” I suppose. But note the distinction is probably not so much between force and form as between fundamental and form. In electromagnetism there’s the electrostatic force and the magnetic force, both of which are the result of the electromagnetic field. Some would say they’re the result of charge, but charge isn’t fundamental. You can create and destroy charge via pair production and annihilation. You can liken this to angular momentum - if you’re an astronaut in space poised in front of a satellite and neither of you are spinning, it’s like there’s no charge. If you grab the satellite and spin it clockwise, you’ll find that the reaction causes you to spin anticlockwise. Angular momentum is conserved - there wasn’t any, now there is, but it nets to zero.

You could say that the positive field variation is on the outside, but it’s probably better to get a handle on the “form” of a charged particle like an electron. It’s a spin ½ particle. I think it’s something like this, with a steering-wheel spin along with a smoke-ring spin:

Reverse the direction of the arrowhead to go from an electron to a positron. That’s like going from clockwise to anticlockwise, only in three dimensions. See cybsoc.org/cybcon2008prog.htm#jw for background reading. The authors of Is the electron a photon with a toroidal topology? were at CERN for 6 years and know their stuff, but this paper has been largely overlooked. Or perhaps “studiously ignored” is closer to the mark. Funny old business is physics.

It is a paper that should be ignored. The two primary reasons that the paper is not valuable is that, while the paper can recover one aspect of the electron, the idea behind the paper is inconsistent with everything else about the election and the paper cannot explain why a photon would ever behave like the author describes.

One should not trust in a broad interpretation of the results of the paper (far beyond that actually written in the paper!) because of the argument from authority that the author of the paper worked at CERN. There are many different kinds of employees at CERN and many of them do not need to understand the physics studied there in great detail.

Here’s a similar paper that has been studiously ignored: The nature of the electron by Qiu-Hong Hu. Papers like these tend to be dissed by naysayers who don’t explain anything and instead butt in to offer platitudes like quantum mechanics surpasseth all human understanding.

If somebody doesn’t understand the relevant physics, they have to ask themselves how reasonable the physics is for that paper. They would note that this paper has only been accepted for publication in a non-professional journal that is populated by papers by non-professional physicists or by physicists publishing outside of their areas of expertise. In other words, a crank journal.

If one was interested in the sociology of jewish people, one would not look to the publications of the Klu Klux Klan. Similarly, one should not look to Physics Essays for good physics. Guilt-by-association is not always a fallacy: one should look carefully to the associations of a person if one wants to use that person as an authority.

This analogy doesn’t hold water at all. if one would be interested in the factual history of the Jews, one should certainly not ask the Jews!

Who has convinced you that the physicists society and the physicists preferred method have the authority over the workings of the universe? There is a chosen direction in which a tradition aims to explain the world and a certain code that is tied to that, and whoever does not strictly use their code is thereby disqualified - by them. Not by any objective reality.

You should re-read my post. I did not suggest that. Indeed, one should consult historians.

In this case, Farsight is attempting to make an argument from authority. If you do not accept this authority, then fine, we agree. If you only want to accept someone as an authority because they agree with what you are saying, that’s fine too, but it won’t convince anyone else.

Whinging about the shortcoming of physics doesn’t get physics done. Neither does accepting half-assed papers.

Ay, I dramatically misread that word. But does it make an essential difference?
Inside accounts of a society are necessarily biased in favor of that societies validity to continue to act as it needs to to preserve itself according to its self-image.

Not to say that an outsider necessarily has a clear perspective - but it does not seem to me that the sources Farsight presents are antagonistic toward and ignorant of the subject of physics, rather reluctant to obey to restriction to certain methods and dogma’s about expected outcomes.

I never got the impression that Farsight was appealing to authority, only that he is making a lot of sense. If he would have needed to appeal to authority to support points he makes I would have ignored those points, they would not have registered with me. The only authority is clarity.