Do Photons Always Travel at the Speed of Light
How does a photon accelerate to light speed and so quickly?
Category: Physics Published: June 26, 2014
Like water waves, audio waves, and all other waves, calorie-free waves are already going at a certain not-zero speed the moment they are created, without needing to be accelerated. Public Domain Epitome, source: The states Department of Health and Human Services.
A photon of light does not accelerate to light speed. Rather, a photon is already traveling at calorie-free speed c when information technology is created. It'southward not like a photon jumps from a speed of naught to light speed instantaneously. Rather, a photon is ever traveling at c, from the moment of its creation. If you call up of a photon every bit a solid ball, and so you are justified in finding it cool that information technology could already exist going at a high speed the moment it is created. For example, before a mud ball can whirl through the air, you lot have to form the ball from a mud puddle and and so throw it to go information technology up to speed.
The key is that a photon is non a traditional particle. Rather information technology is a quantum object, which is part wave, and part particle. When a photon is being created, it is acting mostly similar a wave, and waves have no problem going a certain speed from the moment they are created. For instance, bob your hand up and downwardly confronting a pond'due south still surface and you will create h2o waves that ripple away from your hand. The water waves practise not start out motionless and then slowly choice upwardly speed as they travel away. The water waves are already traveling at their nominal speed the moment you start creating them. That is how waves behave.
Waves are created because a deformation in the material medium or in the field medium causes the medium to snap dorsum towards the equilibrium state, but overshoot this state, and therefore end up oscillating back and forth, all the while yanking neighboring regions into the aforementioned motility. The moving ridge speed is therefore determined by the medium's ability to snap back, and non by an external amanuensis pushing the moving ridge to advance it to different speeds. Pushing harder on the medium just makes the crests of the waves taller. It does non make the wave travel faster through space. If the medium is constant beyond a region of space and across all frequencies of motion, then the wave speed will exist constant through this region. In a region of uniform medium, a wave cannot accelerate. Therefore if a wave is created in such a region, it must be created right at the wave speed of that region.
This is not just a quantum concept. It applies to all waves, from seismic waves, ocean waves, and sound waves, to waves on a piano string. Some people say that the reason a photon travels at low-cal speed the moment information technology is created is because it is a massless particle, and therefore must ever travel at the speed of light. While it is true that the photon is massless and therefore always travels at c in all reference frames, this is not the reason that it is created already having a speed. The reason is simply because information technology is a wave. Other quantum objects such every bit the electron practice take mass, and they have no trouble being created at some non-nil speed without e'er needing to be accelerated to this speed. All breakthrough objects are partly waves and therefore can have a speed the moment they are created. For case, a free neutron eventually decays to a proton and creates an electron and an anti-neutrino in the procedure. This decay has been observed experimentally many times. The electron that is created in this process zips off at a certain speed that it has the moment it is created, without ever being accelerated. The electron can practice this, fifty-fifty though it has mass, because it has wave-like backdrop.
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