Ok but photons don’t change direction either. Treating photon scattering as an individual particle accelerating due to an applied force, well that’s just not a correct description of how perturbative QED models photon interactions.
Comment on Speediest little fella.
Entropius@lemmy.world 1 year agoAcceleration and Velocity are vectors. Changes in a velocity vector are an acceleration. Therefore when photons change direction technically it’s a form of acceleration.
ziggurism@lemmy.world 1 year ago
metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub 1 year ago
I thought photons are always moving in straight lines from their perspective, and it’s space that’s bent. Unless it’s through a medium, then they just get absorbed and re-emitted, sort of.
Entropius@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Space bending is a general relativity thing, which isn’t really related much to how mirrors work.
Regarding the medium but, photons being absorbed and remitted can’t explain how light moves slower in glass. This is just an extremely popular myth. Photons are only absorbed by atoms at very specific frequencies. Also, the entire reason glass is transparent to begin with is that it’s not absorbing the photons (requires too much energy to bump the electron’s energy level the photon to photon isn’t absorbed and it keeps on trucking). Also photon absorption and remission is stochastic so there’s no way to control the direction it happens in or how quickly it happens. Random directions of remitted light would make glass translucent, not transparent. So for a few reasons, that’s not how it works.