* My brothers and I attended a little 100-student highschool, Duncan College Preparatory School. It was a 50'x50' three-story house. The top story was for a never-used physics/chemistry lab and special gatherings like public-speaking class or honor clubs. Next floor down had a library, class room, cafeteria and part of headmaster’s residence. Main floor had another part of headmaster's residence, a large study hall and four class rooms arranged for the respect-crushing trap system.
* The basement right contained a trough urinal tilted so one side didn't drain, two toilets with overhead reservoirs, one sink and two showers, all sharing space on a damp concrete floor with a central drain. The basement left was a dressing room with insufficient facilities for leaving clothes during sports practice plus a dry-mud crawl space where we laid out our shoulder pads etc after practice to “dry”. These were malodorous areas wreaking of ammonia, mildew and BO. Occasionally in the basement, karma was balanced with a belt.
* There was a two-car garage where athletic equipment was stacked in the off season and game uniforms between games, in addition to the headmaster’s car. Duncan School engendered modesty, even humility; but we were proud of our motto: Vivat Veritas (let truth live).
* All the teachers were dedicated, fair and fondly remembered by most students, few of which survive since the school closed in 1952. Perhaps the most impactful was Benjamin Abernathy, our English teacher who made us memorize exemplary poetry. A large group of his students celebrated his 100th birthday in Trevecca Assisted Living. To our surprise, Mr Ab gave each of us a collection of his poetic compositions, in a book assembled by one of his distinguished students, Fred Russell. Prior to that, we were unaware of his creative accomplishments.
* The poem that I liked most was titled Daffodils – about items in his yard and house reminding him of his beloved wife of 60 years, deceased one year earlier. I liked it so much that I wrote a melody and a chorus for it under the title Silent Empty Chair. I sing it annually in late winter or early spring, when the daffodils have wilted.
Silent Empty Chair
BH Abernathy & DM Regen 2003
The daffo1dils with 4love and 1care
She set in 1clumps a5cross the 1lawn
In natural 1scattered 4random 1way
Have bloomed a1gain, a5gain are 1gone
+ The kindest 4heart I’ve ever 1known
-- One year a1go this very 5day
+ She closed her 1eyes at 4setting 1sun
+ Eliza1beth was 5called a1way
Her picture 1by my 4mirror 1smiles
No voice is 1heard no 5answered 1call
Her little 1shoes be4side the 1bed
No footsteps 1tread the 5darkened 1hall
Today a 1year has 4crept a1way
A hopeless 1and a 5lonely 1year
Across the 1table 4facing 1me
*There sits a 1silent 5empty 1chair
* These musings attempt to wed some quantum dynamics with some classic dynamics -- seeking the limits of determinism. Please disabuse constructively.
* Between Google and YouTube, one can read, hear and see every observation and theory learnable in an undergraduate physics course. Yet I don’t find convincing descriptions and explanations of photon formation, translation and absorption – likewise with models of magnetism.
* For example, a photon is depicted as a train of electromagnetic sine waves, while it seems more likely to be half of a sine wave ie one phase or pulse (from zero to peak and back to zero). If photons are propagated pulses, then one might imagine each photon produced by a charge translation from a higher-potential location to a lower-potential location. One might imagine the photon’s spin orientation to be the direction of that charge translation and the photon’s translation to be transverse to that charge translation, the photon traveling like a frisbee not like a rifle bullet.
* I guess that spin is the photon’s magnetic curl and that the photon’s energy is in that spin, not in its translational inertia. I suspect that absorption is the reverse of emission, that the photon hits it’s target particle always with it’s spin axis transverse to the direction of incidence, and it accelerates a target electron in the direction of its spin axis, the same or opposite direction as the charge translation that produced the photon, barring disturbance in transit.
* I presume that Compton photon-scattering angle depends on centering of the incident photon on the target electron essentially consistent with conventional interpretation, but I suspect that the predicted angle of electron departure may be wrong. I was unable to find measured electron-departure angles. By the way, scattered photons seem not to be quantized.
* Much of the above speculation derives from my dissatisfaction with descriptions of radio-antenna action. Those descriptions are theoretical and practical, never analytical. They imply that a transmitter emits giant photons. This seems unlikely considering the distribution of events producing the carrier wave. I wonder what an analysis of transmitter emissions would show?
* Finally, there are questions of photon emission and magnetic field formation in response to EMF in conductors of various geometries. Emissions and fields about some specially shaped conductors seem paradoxical. Does emission or field depend on what accelerates the electrons (EMF, magnetic change, thermal collision)? And really finally, are charge-forces-at-distance mediated by virtual photons behaving unlike the photons we know and love?
