Faster than the speed of light?

As was said earlier light takes longer to pass through water even air but that isn't because it is slowed down it is because it gets bounced around a bit so it takes a slightly longer route rather than a direct one.

However light is affected and is slowed down by gravity as is time, for instance it takes a photon of light in the form of a gamma ray somewhere between 10,000 — 170,000 years to travel from the core of the sun to its surface, a journey that should only take 2.3 seconds.

Uber convincing argument is "light can't escape a black hole" .. ???
 
As far as I remember light cannot escape a black hole but according to quantum theory it may do so.

Also according to my (fairly old) books gravity distorts space which is what slows light (and time) down, relatively speaking.
 
What happens inside a black hole is beyond our ability to understand, basically physics does not seem to apply so anything you can imagine is possible my own pet theory is that black holes are punctures in the space time continuum caused by massive gravitational fields in which our universe leaks into another universe, so if you passed through one you would end up in another universe with a different resonance than ours.

Our universe resonates in C so there is nothing to stop there being others resonating in D, F, G and so on...
 
Computer code at it's most basic is binary. DNA is quadrinary. Imagine what we could make if we were capable of computing and constructing code in DNA. I guess that's what we are aiming for. There could be a time in the future where we plant houses. Imagine that!
 
I don't like the idea of that. I just can't imagine how many houses I would have to plant before getting one that didn't fall down. Yours, Brown Fingers,
 
Does anyone know what the motive force of a photon is? I mean how does it burst into existence and suddenly go from zero to the universal constant without some kind of stored energy to propel it?
 
I don't really understand your question (particularly regarding the universal constant), but I think maybe this will help:
  • A photon doesn't burst into existence from nothing, it has to get its energy from somewhere. A particle in a high energy state can emit a photon thus entering a lower (more stable) energy state, for example. This forms the basis of lasers, amongst other things, and I hope answers the question about where the energy comes from..
  • Once the photon has (kinetic) energy, I could oversimplify things and say that by Newton's Laws unless something experiences a Force it's velocity remains constant. Photons are massless and carry no charge so gravitational and electromagnetic forces aren't an issue, and that photon is going to keep ploughing ahead until it "hits" something.
I hope this helps in some way and isn't patronising or anything. It's late, I've got a lot on my mind, and it's difficult to know the background of people and where they are coming from looking only at text sometimes.
 
Not patronising at all, but I will expand my question tomorrow as It did not cover the problems I have with photons...

Edit

By universal constant I mean "C" the speed of light in a vacuum...
 
When a photon is absorbed by an electron, it is completely destroyed, all its energy is imparted to the electron, which instantly jumps to a new energy level. The photon itself ceases to be. In the equations which govern this interaction, one side of the equation (for the initial state) has terms for both the electron and the photon, while the other side (representing the final state) has only one term: for the electron.

The opposite happens when an electron emits a photon. The photon is not selected from a "well" of photons living in the atom; it is created instantaneously out of the vacuum.

The electron in the high energy level is instantly converted into a lower energy-level electron and a photon, there is no in-between state where the photon is being constructed. It instantly pops into existence.

So the question is: where does the photon come from and why is it instantly travelling at 186,000 miles per second?

Strangely, it doesn't seem to come from anywhere, the universe must put the extra energy somewhere, and because electrons in atoms are electromagnetic phenomena, a photon is born with the required energy. In a weak-force interaction, say the decay of a neutron, that energy goes into a neutrino particle which is also instantaneously created.

Each force has its own carrier particles, and knows how to make them.

So that is why I asked the question, where does a photon get it's motive force from....?
 
Dark matter.

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Mephistopheles Not sure there's an answer for that, at least from me! Once we get down to nuclear decays, particle physics, quantum physics etc. everything stops being certain and starts becoming probabilities. You could get an answer to the question why is a photon more likely to be emitted in this case or in that case, but how it comes to be in the first place is a completely different matter. I think it's basically "just what the universe , at the minute but they're might be things I'm not aware of.

Now this is in bull shit territory, but one way perhaps you could describe it is by thinking of the electron as a drop of water, where the water represents its energy. The drop wobbles around, and wobbles more with higher energy, and sometimes it wobbles enough to emit another drop (a photon). The analogy doesn't really work, but that's about as good as you're going to get from me I think.
 
I know there isn't an answer yet but I like to think about these things now and then too keep my brain from going to mush, and who knows one day I may have an eureka moment...
 
You know I think this is some pish from 2011 or when ever this first appeared. ****ing hate the April 1st bollocks particuarly now with social media reposting these fake stories 6 days after 'fools' day.
 
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You know I think this is some pish from 2011 or when ever this first appeared. ****ing hate the April 1st bollocks particuarly now with social media reposting these fake stories 6 days after 'fools' day.
With more than 70% of the worlds population being fools I guess everyday is fools day.
 
You know I think this is some pish from 2011 or when ever this first appeared. ****ing hate the April 1st bollocks particuarly now with social media reposting these fake stories 6 days after 'fools' day.

I do remember this from back a while ago. I don't think it was complete 'pish'. From memory, it was more to do with the measurement of the speed at which the neutrinos traveling, the calculation of which had some inherent probabilistic variance. I can't remember the outcome but perhaps because of the inaccuracy in the measurement it was discounted?
 
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