I’ve been busy trying to think through more test results, setting up new tests and trying to come up with any explanation at all that explains the results.  The old claim that light moves as a wave and a particle just doesn’t sit well with me and I hope that I can either make sense of the claim, or show that its not true.  Perhaps we’ll do nothing more than confirm the old results, but along the way, I hope to gain more understanding into the movements of our only true friend.

The real problem outside of me not understanding the claims, are that I can’t confirm them.  I’ve done a pretty good job of setting up my tests in ways that should have duplicated the old test results seen by others, yet I am unable to see them.  While I do see lines on the wall, they can’t be explained using wave theory as has been used by so many before.  The reason, it would seem, is that waves interact with each other, requiring more than a single wave.  Something has to happen to cause the wave to change, such as it running into another wave and creating a third wave formation.  To explain a single wave, simply brushing by the edge of an object and causing an interference pattern at some point just makes no logical sense.

As an example, I took 2 books and set them up in a dark room and used an LED flashlight to shine between them.  The result was a pattern on the back wall, yet, thinking through this using wave theory, you’d have to be looking for a second wave.  What I should have gotten is a single wave coming out from the slit and spreading uniform across the back wall, not a pattern of light and dark lines.  I then removed one of the books and allowed the light to flow past the book.  Again, if you look, you will see more patterns of light and dark lines.  While a water wave for example would bend around the edge of the object, it doesn’t cause a pattern of high and low spots on the back wall that it eventually contacts.

Moving to my shop and getting back to testing with the laser, I confirmed the results I saw inside with the LED’s.  I removed the slits and used a single piece of material, both thin and thick to see what differences they made.  The results consistently were patterns on the wall. 

Then I tested using a single peice of thin aluminum to split the light with no other objects around to interfere with its path.  The result this time was no pattern, which again somewhat conflicts with stories I’ve read on the tests performed.

So, I may regret ever sharing this information but I want this blog to be a real time log of my thoughts and experiments so to keep things honest, here is what I think today:

I believe the statement that light moves as a wave and a particle is just wrong.  I think its only a particle and that it moves at a constant speed as it passes by objects on its way to the eternal abyss.  I think that the fact that light moves at a constant speed is a very important aspect of why we see what we see when it hits objects.  I think this consistancy in speed is what makes the uniformed patterns we see and then try to explain using formulas that just don’t fit.

If one thinks of the movement as a particle, then what logically would happen as it hit an object?  Some of the particles would be injected into the main stream of particles and would bounce off.  Not only would they bounce off, but they would also set off a chain reaction of other particles bouncing back and forth into a pattern that we might see on a wall as it strikes the wall.  In fact, the initial particles would be bounced off the main stream and at some angle outside of the main stream, causing the appearance that they were bending around the object.

This chain reaction could also explain the patterns we see on the wall, as well as why I didn’t see them with a single thin object in my earlier tests.  The reason would seem to be, that as the stream bounces off both sides of the object, they are bounced back into the main stream on the other side and no pattern is seen. Adding a slit where the two sides are actually injected into the larger stream, you would have a much larger flow of injected particles into the stream and therefore might expect that things eventually make it out the other sides as they bounce back and forth.

Again, this is only a theory at this point as I have nothing substantial to back up my claims.  I will continue to experiment and see if there is something I can do to prove my theories, right or wrong…

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glenn hancock