3 ms·

What’s the difference between photons bouncing in a box, and a gas? …no, really? There’s a lot of them, starting with the fact that gas particles have mass, an

What’s the difference between photons bouncing in a box, and a gas? …no, really? There’s a lot of them, starting with the fact that gas particles have mass, and photons generally don’t. However, confinement causes mass. The gas particles are in a sense confined even when floating free (by other fields), and photons are only confined when they bounce off the walls, however- They do that a lot. As you zoom out, the phenomena start to look alike.

brimble 5y ago
Sure, I'm more hung up on the "just shoot some photons into a mirrored box and they'll bounce around forever". That... can't possibly be very close to what they actually did, right? This is one of those cases in which the description that makes it to the public has almost nothing to do with what actually happened, surely? Or did they really do that, and if so, how? It seems like it'd fail for a hundred different reasons. That's more interesting than the phenomenon, to me. I watched the video and nothing they showed looks like a mirrored box.
- anon_123g987 5y ago
  A mirror is an object that reflects an image / light / photons. There are mirrors with different reflectiveness and different construction. In the video the prof says they are using a "highly reflective nanostructured mirror", so it's obviously not exactly your silvered glass bathroom variety mirror, but in principle it's the same: a surface that reflects almost all photons, and absorbs or transmits almost none. The box is also not necessarily like your average shoe box, I'd guess it's much smaller (millimeters), show it's not shown on the video directly, up close.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Seems like the ultimate size would be limited by the reflectivity coefficient too. The speed of the photons makes for a whole lot of reflection events. The stats take over from there. I found the idea of this experiment strangely compelling too. This stuff is hard to begin to understand for most people I would imagine. That is generally true for me. For me, that all translates into an fun and interesting mode of conceptual thought akin to what happens with good sci-fi. Mixing the concepts of gasses and light is novel to me as well, and I suppose that is what makes this one compelling. I wonder whether this idea might be combined with how we have slowed the travel speed of light down many orders? Perhaps the materials forming the mirror box do that? I am going to read this one again (during more normal waking concentration hours) and follow a few of the science rabbit holes the references will surely contain.
kurthr 5y ago
Well, photons are bosons (spin 1 not 1/2) as result they have very different statistics. You can get population inversion (e.g. a laser or bose condensate) where many of the bosons all sit in a single energy level. That's not possible for fermions due to the fermi exclusion principal (e.g. electron orbital shells).
eurasiantiger 5y ago
> confinement causes mass So the Pythagoreans were on the right track!
nextaccountic 5y ago
> However, confinement causes mass That's interesting, can you elaborate? Or point to some link that discuss this
- colanderman 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence#Composite_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc... gives some hints: > A simple example of an object with moving parts but zero total momentum is a container of gas. In this case, the mass of the container is given by its total energy [...] Similarly, even photons, if trapped in an isolated container, would contribute their energy to the mass of the container. Such extra mass, in theory, could be weighed in the same way as any other type of rest mass, even though individually photons have no rest mass. i.e., it's a consequence of energy-mass equivalence, which applies equally to isolated systems as it does individual particles.

brimble 5y ago

Sure, I'm more hung up on the "just shoot some photons into a mirrored box and they'll bounce around forever". That... can't possibly be very close to what they actually did, right? This is one of those cases in which the description that makes it to the public has almost nothing to do with what actually happened, surely? Or did they really do that, and if so, how? It seems like it'd fail for a hundred different reasons. That's more interesting than the phenomenon, to me. I watched the video and nothing they showed looks like a mirrored box.

anon_123g987 5y ago
A mirror is an object that reflects an image / light / photons. There are mirrors with different reflectiveness and different construction. In the video the prof says they are using a "highly reflective nanostructured mirror", so it's obviously not exactly your silvered glass bathroom variety mirror, but in principle it's the same: a surface that reflects almost all photons, and absorbs or transmits almost none. The box is also not necessarily like your average shoe box, I'd guess it's much smaller (millimeters), show it's not shown on the video directly, up close.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Seems like the ultimate size would be limited by the reflectivity coefficient too. The speed of the photons makes for a whole lot of reflection events. The stats take over from there. I found the idea of this experiment strangely compelling too. This stuff is hard to begin to understand for most people I would imagine. That is generally true for me. For me, that all translates into an fun and interesting mode of conceptual thought akin to what happens with good sci-fi. Mixing the concepts of gasses and light is novel to me as well, and I suppose that is what makes this one compelling. I wonder whether this idea might be combined with how we have slowed the travel speed of light down many orders? Perhaps the materials forming the mirror box do that? I am going to read this one again (during more normal waking concentration hours) and follow a few of the science rabbit holes the references will surely contain.

kurthr 5y ago

Well, photons are bosons (spin 1 not 1/2) as result they have very different statistics. You can get population inversion (e.g. a laser or bose condensate) where many of the bosons all sit in a single energy level. That's not possible for fermions due to the fermi exclusion principal (e.g. electron orbital shells).

eurasiantiger 5y ago

> confinement causes mass So the Pythagoreans were on the right track!

nextaccountic 5y ago

> However, confinement causes mass That's interesting, can you elaborate? Or point to some link that discuss this

colanderman 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence#Composite_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc... gives some hints: > A simple example of an object with moving parts but zero total momentum is a container of gas. In this case, the mass of the container is given by its total energy [...] Similarly, even photons, if trapped in an isolated container, would contribute their energy to the mass of the container. Such extra mass, in theory, could be weighed in the same way as any other type of rest mass, even though individually photons have no rest mass. i.e., it's a consequence of energy-mass equivalence, which applies equally to isolated systems as it does individual particles.