Re: Aether Alert

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Paul Nicholson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <paul-at-abelian.demon.co.uk>

Hi Boris,

Great to hear from you. 

Perhaps it is asking for trouble, and I hesitate before mentioning
this, but the vacuum throws up virtual photons in four polarisation
states, the two that are transverse, and two others: one a longitudinal
state, and a fourth state polarised in the time direction, which you
could just about get away with calling a 'scalar' photon.  However,
the laws of QED happen to come out that the longitudinal and time
polarisations cancel one another out when you add up all the quantum
probabilities, and you end up left with just the two familiar
transverse polarisations.  The law which leads to this cancellation
comes from the requirement for non-negative probabilities for events -
so it's a pretty fundamental constraint necessary for the self-
consistency of any massless vector field.

Thus, delightfully, the longitudinal and scalar waves cancel each
other out and disappear.  Pity we can't say the same about their
proponents.

cf Aitchison, 'An informal introduction to gauge field theories',
chapter 4: Quantisation of massless vector fields.
Oxford Uni press, 1982.

which counts I think as one of the more accessible books on this
subject, but the reader needs to be well familiar with the math of
both quantum mechanics and relativity.
--
Paul Nicholson
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