Question by somone: How can a magnet make a metal move if it is just massless photons?
Photons are massless, its just light, so how can a magnetic field emitted by a something like a magnet cause a metal e.g. iron to move?
I’m kind of guessing that it is related in some way to solar sails (the hypothesized form of propulsion), if it does could someone please explain how this works too?
Thanks
Best answer:
Answer by cyberphlak
Because it isn’t about mass and gravity but rather about electrons being attracted to protons.
What do you think? Answer below!
2 Responses
You need to study magnetism more carefully. There are no “real” photons associated with it. Read:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html
http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=2348
Magnetism is about spinning electrical charges attracting and repelling one another. No one has yet explained satisfactorily how this force is transmitted across empty space. Instead, they offer mathematical descriptions of the effect and claim that the math is the cause.
In an electromagnet, the charges are moving thru a loop of wire; in an atom, they move in orbit around the nucleus. But electrons also spin within their own tiny space, which is like 10,000 times smaller than an atomic nucleus. If two electrons spin in the same direction, they cancel each other’s magnetic influence. If the spins don’t all cancel, the atom is magnetic.
In my own Fractal Foam Model of Universes, an electron is a pair or group of ethereal shear waves (which move at the speed of light) orbiting one another because of the influence of ethereal pressure waves (a.k.a., dark energy, which move at the speed of gravity, billions of times faster than light). The pressure waves are massless, but like photon’s, they do carry momentum; and some of that momentum is transferred to a shear wave when there is a collision. The transfer of momentum between shear waves and pressure waves depends on the relative wave lengths, phase angles and polarities. Each fundamental particle is a chaotic attractor with its own composition of shear waves in a particlular pattern; the electron is one such attractor.
If I could work out the particular configuration of shear waves that make up an electron, I might be able to show mathematically how pressure waves transmit the forces of charge and magnetism. Unfortunately, I am not a mathematician. To properly develop my model, it may be necessary for a mathematician develop a new branch of chaos theory relating to acoustic waves in an infinite expanse of foam.