Saturday, March 26, 2011

photon travel as a spiral?

In high school, I learned light travel in straight path, and so photon shoot straight like a projectile.  Sound, on the other hand, is a wave and difract when passing thru an opening like door.  Light show refraction when shone on a prism.  Light was supposed to have this dual particle-wave nature, which was mind bugling incomprehensible.  I never took quantum mechanics, so I don't know what the current model is.  But recently I learned that physicists have finally proven that photon has mass.   So now I wonder... could this photon particle, instead of traveling in straight path like a projectile, could it be traveling in a corkscrew/spiral manner?  The path that the photon takes could be like the shape laid out by the alpha-helix in protein structure?  It turns along a central axis and move in a forward direction at the same time?  When looked sideway, the corkscrew path would look like a wave, yet shooting straight when viewed at a higher level?  If this is true, then it indicate that light could difract?  When a spiral/corkscrew pass thru a metal sheet with hole of exactly the same diameter of the spiral, it can go straight thru.  But there is a very small "play" room, where a slightly off path spiral can go thru if the winding part hits the hole rather than the plate.  A light ray would have a large number of such corkscrew photons and some of them may rub the edge of the hole of the light, nudging it off-path and thus cause difraction?

Ditto, when electron spins around the nucleus of an atom, maybe it is also rotating along its axis, just like planets spin/rotate while circling the sun?  In the bluemoon when electron hit against one another, one or both of their spin may change direction, say from clockwise to anti-clockwise?  This would mean electron shooting out away from the nucleus could also show difraction pattern?  Hmm... so spinning ball hitting the wall would go off path, it does not need a spiral traveling trajectory?  Time to go back to physics class????


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