Jim Green brought up something I've recently been musing about: waves,
photons, and the photoelectric effect.
Photons are thought to exist because sensitive film, CCDs and GM tubes
receive "single photon" events, and a single photon can bump an atom's
single electron up to a higher energy level. And UV light on zinc gives
out electrons of a certain maximum velocity.
However, I stumbled across something bizarre involving the need for
1-angstrom atoms to absorb 6000-angstrom light waves. (and the "energy
sucking" resonator antenna effect.)
If a small tuned circuit can absorb radio waves by creating a strong AC
field around itself, then something interesting might occur when the radio
waves first "illuminate" a circuit for the first time.
Imagine that the "onset" of the pattern of radio waves reaches the circuit
for the first time. The circuit cannot respond because it's size is so
much smaller than the wavelength. However, it does collect a tiny amount
of energy from the radio waves... which creates a small AC field around
the circuit... which diverts some Poynting Field lines into the circuit...
which intercepts more energy.
If the Q of the circuit is infinite, then the AC field around the circuit
will continuously grow and continously intercept an increasing energy
flux, and so go into exponential "runaway" until it hits a limit. I assume
this limit is reached when the current/voltage in the circuit becomes so
large that there is some sort of breakdown in the components. If the
components in the circuit are "ideal" and cannot be destroyed, then there
still would be a limit reached when the fields became strong enough to
"fill" the nearfield region and begin radiating as much energy as is
received. As a result, the atom would behave transparent again.
Why is this bizarre? Because the tuned circuit might sit there for quite
awhile before the "energy sucking" effect would ramp up to maximum. While
sitting, the circuit would not be an absorber, it would be totally
transparent to the waves. And when the "ramping up" process finally
occurred, it would all be over in an instant because of the exponential
growth.
When the exponential growth takes soff, it's almost as if the tuned
circuit was struck by a physical object.
Like a "tiny baseball" of electromagnetic energy.
If atoms behave as small coil-capacitor RLC resonators, and if they are
suddenly illuminated by light, at first they would act transparent,
since their resonant fields had not built up yet. Then, when the AC field
got a small toe-hold on a particular atom... BANG! The AC field would
burst into being, a certain amount of energy would be absorbed by the
atom, and then the atom would again "go transparent" as it radiates EM
energy at the same rate as that of absorbtion.
This sounds suspiciously like a photon-absorbtion event, no?
Yet no photons are needed.
Shine radio waves upon a "gas" made from small tuned circuits, and the
circuits will individually go "bang" at various times as the AC fields
surrounding them burst into being.
Maybe EM waves do exist, but maybe photons are an artifact of the atoms'
resonant-circuit absorbtion process. Maybe "energy sucking antennas"
defeats "photoelectric effect"?
:)
For my next trick, I shall pull an instantaneous quantum-entanglement
communications device out of a silk top hat, thus showing that "Dilbert"
was wrong, but that his janitor was correct.