https://chatgpt.com/share/1c0bd592-1f3c-4af0-8428-b58beeb73044
I woke up on 7/16-18/2024 thinking about photons, what they are, how they are created and most importantly do they carry intelligence. This I discussed with ChatGPT, see the link above.
I continued to explore photons with ChatGPT. Elsewhere in internet land I saw a comment in either Scientific American or AAAS that ChatGPT and other AI instruments did not produce hallucinations but rather bullshit. Hmm, looking for clickbait. I couldn’t read the comment because of a paywall and I didn’t have my password on hand.
Anyway, at the end of the chat, I asked CGTP to tell me where the term photon came from. Chat said Gilbert Lewis coined the term in 1926 based upon both Max Planck and Albert Einstein works on discrete (particles of) energy. At some point, I’ll check with chat, particles and waves were smooshed together to form today’s understanding of energy.
Thus far, my take away from this is that when I look at a distant star or galaxy, my eyes will absorb the photons from that source, convert it through a chemical biological process to something my brain can understand (or try to) but also destroying the photons during that process. So I’m looking at photons from a galaxy billions of light years away (you know, a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away), these photons have travelled immense distance and time, only to be destroyed by my retina so I can see a bit of twinkling in the night sky. Stop looking, your destroying photons.
Evidently, photons can carry other information besides the wavelength of their waves. This gets into the frequency thing, if you remember AM radio has those low frequencies and FM has higher frequencies, visible light frequency is even higher on up to X-rays and gamma rays. Photons can be polarized, phased, time-binned and their orbital angular momentum measured which can carry additional information. Not that I have a clue on how to access any of these things, but who knows what can be learned from long traveling photons.
One other things of interest, humans are very capable of making photons. We learned to make and contain fire using wood, paper, oil, gun powder, we produced light using incandescent, florescent lights, light emitting diodes, we made gigantic amounts of photons through atomic fission, nuclear fusion and then there are the light sabers. What we are not so good at is gathering and controlling photons. Yes, we can build things like lasers that give us some control, but again we are creating photons. Solar panels, telescopes and the like can pull some photons together this enabling our ability “see” things, but we have no way to attract photons. Black holes can but only because of immense gravitation which humans do not control.
Why bother write about such things? I don’t know but I enjoy thinking about photons at 3 AM; although sleep is probably preferable.