Thought for the Day – Physics Again
February 24th, 2006 | No Comments »The fundamental lesson of this exercise is that the teaching of light interaction with the retina of the eye, supported by the physics of visible light interaction with the recently discovered porous silicon nanostructure, is that in both cases light interacts as the wave of classical physics immediately and necessarily adjacent to an absorbing mass comprising quantum confined electron sites. I believe that this should properly be termed a “quantized interaction” a term that, importantly, violates neither classical or quantum physics. How much has the concept that “a photon interacts….with a pigment etc.” led our thought process astray? I quote again a sentence from an exposition on quantum electrodynamics “Paths Not Taken” (mathpages.com/rr/s8-09.htm) to wit “ To speak about the trajectory of a free photon is to speak about something that cannot, even in principle, ever be observed”.I expect that this will elicit controversy but it follows from phenomenological observations that I find difficult to refute – and that explain so much!
So..I would propose that anyone thinking about “streams of photons being guided down the length of retinal receptors and being statisically caught by pigment molecules using the photon catch hypothesis” consider an alternate scenario that is actually taught by the structure of the eye and recent dicoveries in optics, namely that light as a wave travels outside of the receptors, in interreceptor spaces, and imparts energy to the correctly dichroically oriented pigment molecules in a now understood mechansim along the entire receptor length.
GCH
