NON RADIATIVE SELF LUMINOSITY (The following walks on the edge of confusion between luminousness, self luminousness and non radiative self luminousness. Reader beware.) In order to better see what SELF LUMINOUSNESS is, it is useful to concentrate on what self luminousness is not. First we need to clear up the difference between radiative luminousness and non radiative luminousness. To do so we go back to the posting called PONG and we remember that in the physical universe (PU) there are 3 kinds of objects. CAUSE AND ASSIGNED CAUSE (PONG) http://www.clearing.org/cgi/archive.cgi?/homer/cause.memo In the following, the terms light, photons, causal messenger waves (or particles), of any kind are all pretty much synonymous. THREE KINDS OF OBJECTS 1.) Sources, which radiate light. 2.) Reflectors, which reflect light. 3.) Transmitters, which transmit light unaffected. The opposite of a transmitter would be an absorber producing translucency or opaqueness. This is highly idealized. The classic examples are, the sun is a source, the moon is a reflector, and water, air and even spacetime itself are transmitters. Notice in radio terminology a transmitter is a source, which is a different use of the term transmitter than we use it here. Notice also that although the sun is mostly a source, it is also a reflector to some minor degree, and as light moves THROUGH the sun it is also a transmitter. In the same way, although the moon is mostly a reflector, it certainly sources energy in various frequencies such as heat. In fact it can be argued that ALL reflectors are merely absorbers that then re-source some or all of their energy back out. In particular objects which reflect only one frequency of light back out, are usually absorbing all the others in. Thus a 'red' object is reflecting red light and absorbing green and blue. (Notice that there is no such thing as red light, any more than there are transcendental dogs. Transcendental is a quality of numbers, not of dogs. Redness is a quality of self luminous consciousness, not photons. Assigning the quality of redness to a photon is a domain error, and results from collapsing the conscious symbol, which is red, and the physical referent, which has frequency, into one and the same object. We assume the astute reader can keep symbol and referent separate in their mind or they will get no where with these posts.) And lastly spacetime can have varying degrees of transmissiveness or opacity, and in fact quantum zero point spacetime can create and radiate energy out of apparent 'nothing'. All these advanced nuances detract from the basic idea that there are sources, reflectors and transmitters. That any one object may be a complex combination of the three, does not detract from the simplified discussion to follow. RADIATIVE SOURCES All physical universe sources are radiative sources by definition, they radiate ANOTHER object away from themselves, usually light, that then leaves the source behind and travels out into space as a causal messenger wave containing data about the nature of the original source. For example the light waves emanated by the sun are imprinted with various states determined by the constituency of the material that makes up the sun. Not only does some of that material actually cause the radiation, such as when hydrogen melds into helium which emits photons in vary particular frequencies, those photons then need to travel THROUGH the other materials of the sun, not directly involved in the nuclear reaction, which then filter various frequencies out of the light waves as the light passes through them. Thus the light that leaves the sun has at least two major imprints on it. The first imprint is the nature of what created the beam in the first place, and second imprint is the nature of what the beam had to travel through before it escaped the sun. Photons created deep inside the sun travel as slow as molasses and take YEARS to get to the surface and finally escape to go out into space. The important point of all of the above is that the sun is one object, mostly made of hydrogen and helium, and in the process of converting hydrogen to helium it radiates A SECOND DIFFERENT OBJECT out into space as the causal messenger wave. Thus radiative sources involve two different objects, the radiator and the radiated. There is also the radiated through, namely spacetime. RADIATIVE REFLECTORS In the same way, reflectors reradiate out into space the light that is impinging upon them a moment before from another source. For true sources, the source of the radiation is inside the source, for reflectors, the source of the radiation is outside the reflector, but impinging on the reflector. These distinctions are of limited value, as even the energy that a true source radiates had to come from outside the source some time in the past. But with most reflectors it is pretty clear that the source of the incoming energy is RIGHT NOW, and when the energy hits the reflector, it bounces off RIGHT NOW. Again we have two different objects, the moon say, and the light coming from the sun which hits the moon, and then gets reradiated away back into spacetime. And again we have spacetime as the radiated through, which is common to both the moon and the photons coming in and going out. RADIATIVE TRANSMITTERS The whole main purpose of transmitters is to transmit (or not) the radiation emanating from sources and reflectors. There are two kinds of 'transmitters', the first would be a material transmitter such as water and glass, and even semi translucent transmitters like milk and smoked glass. The second would be spacetime itself. We need to keep these two separate because the transmission of energy through spacetime is not the same as the transmission of energy through a material object. Or shall we say that the actual TRANSMISSION of the energy is via spacetime in both cases, but the transmission through a transparent or opaque object is more a function of interactions along the way, or their absence. The reason a photon doesn't make it through a piece of stone, is because it is either absorbed or reflected, rather than transmitted. This is a result of interactions between the photon and the atomic structure of the stone. In the absence of interactions, the photon will transmit through the transmitter material unimpeded. The actual transmission of the photon through spacetime itself is a whole other story than whether a photon makes it through a rock or not. It is tempting to say that the process of radiation has nothing to do with the nature of space time as a transmitter, but the truth is radiation is a complex interaction between what is transmitted, light waves, and the nature and structure of spacetime that allows the transmission to take place. It is not true that spacetime is a passive conduit in the traversal of light through its medium. No we are not claiming that spacetime is like water in a tub passing water waves, that would be something like the AEther theory that was long ago debunked. We are saying something a lot odder, that light is a KIND of spacetime, just as mass is another KIND of spacetime. In other words spacetime itself is the stuff of which PU things are made, and spacetime can have 3 different forms or 'polarizations' if you will. The concept of 'polarized' spacetime is shamelessly stolen from the simple black and white LCD screen of the 1990's. Such screens passively let light through them and appear clear or white until a voltage is placed across some part of them, at which point the crystals realign themselves, polarize, in such a way to block light from going through. Polarized areas of the LCD screen thus appear black. To carry the analogy further, when a black ball moves across an LCD screen, nothing is in fact moving, only the positions of polarization are changing in order to make the illusion that a single black ball is moving across the screen. Thus in each moment of time, we get the idea that there is one single object, the ball, and it is moving, rather than many brand new renditions of the ball being created and destroyed giving the illusion of one object moving. In just such a way, spacetime can exist in (at least) 3 different polarizations. Spacetime can be polarized to 0, in which case it is 'empty' spacetime. Physicists will argue endlessly about whether truly empty spacetime can even exist, we won't pursue the matter further here. There is only one kind of 'non empty' space time called energy, which manifests in two completely different forms, resulting from the other two polarizations, 1 and -1. The two kinds of energy are called matter and light. Matter has a velocity ranging from 0 on up to the speed of light (c), but never attains c. Light has a velocity ranging from c on down to 0, but never attains 0. Spacetime can be polarized to 1, in which case it is spacetime that appears as mass of some kind. Spacetime can be polarized to -1, in which case it is spacetime that appears as light of some kind. The above is highly poetic, and will not be defended further. IN SUMMARY The point of the matter is that, of the three kinds of polarization 1, namely material spacetime objects, sources, reflectors and transmitters, they are every one of them, RADIATIVE sources, reflectors and transmitters. In other words the function of polarization 1 spacetime (mass), is to source, reflect or transmit polarization -1 spacetime (light). It might seem like a major statement, but all material PU objects radiate something, if only gravity. Even blackholes radiate and eventually vanish. We call all such radiators LUMINOSITIES, as it is by their radiation that they can be 'seen' and thus known about across a distance. THE ONLY OBJECTS THAT CAN BE SEEN IN THE PU ARE RADIATIVE LUMINOSITIES, if an object does not radiate or reflect something, there is no way to know it is there from a distance. Notice that a radiator and its radiation are two different objects, thus any effort to learn about the nature of the radiator (referent) by interacting with its radiation (symbol) will produce unverifiable theory at best, and total nonsense at worst. CAUSAL PATHWAYS ARE THEORIES, NOT PERFECT CERTAINTIES. Any sequence of radiators and radiation is called a causal pathway, and since causal pathways can not verify the integrity of themselves, they can never verify the integrity of any other causal pathway either. More causal pathways do not a more certain causal pathway make. Thus radiation does not prove radiator. FLUORESCENCE AND PHOSPHORESCENCE Fluorescence is a kind of radiative source. It is usually an energy absorbed by a non transmissive material, which then reradiates at a different frequency than it was absorbed at. So it is a kind of very complex reflection. Take a fluorescent rock and put it under ultra violet light, and the rock glows red, green, yellow or white. Some materials will not only fluoresce, they will phosphoresce which means they will continue to glow even after the energizing source is removed. The dials on watch hands are like this. So such glowing in the dark is a kind of sourcing, just like the sun does. The sun gets it glow from fusing hydrogen into helium, the watch dial gets its glow from absorbing a random photon from the environment and then later reemitting it as another photon usually in a different color. Used to be watch dials were painted with a fluorescent paint mixed with radium. As the radium nuclei decayed, they emitted particles that hit the fluorescent paint atoms which made them absorb the energy from the particle, and then resource visible light. The mechanisms for all these things are theoretically well understood and not relevant to the discussion here. The point is that the glowing rock or watch dial is a kind of radiative luminousness, meaning it sources its own energy. Whether it gets its energy from a nuclear reaction as the sun does, or by absorbing it first from the environment, or getting it from the spontaneous decay of a radium atom, the result is always the same, the emanation of a SECOND OBJECT, a causal messenger wave, usually a photon, that then spreads out into space and time. LUMINOUSNESS Luminous merely means the object is sourcing causal messenger waves by whatever means. It can be luminosity in the visible light spectrum, or in the invisible spectrums above or below. Luminousness or luminescence can be the result of absorbtion and resourcing, or the spontaneous decay or fusion of atomic nucleii, or the combustion or chemical reaction such as fire or body warmth. In this sense both the sun and the moon are luminous. By SELF luminous we mean sourcing its own emanation, and not merely reflecting the emanations of others. In the sense that ALL emanations have to come from somewhere, the concept of SELF luminousness is probably not rigorously defined. But from the common language point of view, it is easy to see that the sun emanates 'its own' light, and the moon mostly reflects the light of another. Thus the sun we shall call self luminous and the moon we shall call merely luminous. 'Luminous orb that rules the night...' The rock that glows under the influence of UV light is NOT self luminous, but the rock that continues to glow after the UV light or stimulation is removed. is. As we said above, the problem with any kind of RADIATIVE self luminousness, is the energy had to come from somewhere before it was radiated, thus making some of these distinctions is walking the bogus side of scientific thought. However I think we can all agree that in the physical universe all luminosity is radiative luminosity, and some of that is radiative self luminosity. So why all this interest in radiative self luminosity? Because we want to understand NON RADIATIVE SELF LUMINOSITY. A non radiative self luminous object, does not emanate, across space and time, ANOTHER OBJECT DIFFERENT FROM ITSELF (radiation), from which one can then see the referent (the radiator) via the symbol (the radiated). Yet a non radiative self luminous object can still be seen. Thus it is LUMINOUS. But it is neither a source of radiation, nor a reflector of radiation nor a transmitter of radiation, and thus it is not a radiator of any kind. Not being dependent on prior radiation to light it up, it becomes self luminous by definition. Not sourcing radiation of its own, yet still being lit up, it becomes non radiative self luminousness by definition. A non radiative self luminous object is one and only one object which can yet still be seen. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith The Paths of Lovers Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 KC2ITF Cross Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@lightlink.com In the Line of Duty http://www.lightlink.com Thu Mar 4 21:34:16 EST 2010