ok.. this just dawned on me, I had to post this, sorry..

In electricity, electrons are not moving very fast, but the electric
current moves at almost speed of light, because that's a wave. So, why
not say, aether is a photon gas, photons are all around moving
randomly with small speeds, but it's the light (photon current) that
moves at c (and its frequency just like AC frequency) So, say, the
photons we "receive" from the sun are not the original photons, but
the photons that were already around. How would we know? Aether drag:
I guess any mass could push photons around without being much
affected. That would create a burst photon wave, but its frequency and
energy could be very small to detect. But if I could shake a mass some
10^14 times a second, I imagine it would start glowing.

I read about experiment to detect single photons, but the setup didn't
look very convincing to me, involving CCDs and detected random dots,
the result could be the property of this setup maybe

Dear wespe:

"wespe" wrote in message
om...
ok.. this just dawned on me, I had to post this, sorry..

In electricity, electrons are not moving very fast, but the electric
current moves at almost speed of light, because that's a wave. So, why
not say, aether is a photon gas, photons are all around moving
randomly with small speeds, but it's the light (photon current) that
moves at c (and its frequency just like AC frequency) So, say, the
photons we "receive" from the sun are not the original photons, but
the photons that were already around. How would we know?

We have local light sources. All light travels at c. We have one
mechanism for creation of one photon from the energy of another, Compton
scattering. And it does not provide a specular image.

Sorry.

David A. Smith

wespe:

Aether drag:
I guess any mass could push photons around without being much
affected. That would create a burst photon wave, but its frequency and
energy could be very small to detect. But if I could shake a mass some
10^14 times a second, I imagine it would start glowing.

I read about experiment to detect single photons, but the setup didn't
look very convincing to me, involving CCDs and detected random dots,
the result could be the property of this setup maybe

It's easy to detect single photons. It's done all the time in
gamma ray spectroscopy. In fact it's very easy to measure a gamma
ray given off from the de-excitation of the daughter nucleus
in a reaction like:

-----
/ \
/ \beta
----- 1st The gamma from the de-excitation of
| the first excited state to the gs
| \gamma can easily be measured in coincidence
v with the emitted beta. That single
____ gs photon can be detected using a
Ge(Li) or HPGe detector.