This is now nothing to do with light.
You mean what is physics and how does it work?
I don't build trains, but I'd get slightly peeved if I was on one that derailed, or started heading in a different direction than the one indicated by the ticket I bought. Just saying.
Just lets stay on point is all. I have started a few science threads and I noted your comments so I will make efforts to do more.
Your threads have been good of late and I have participated in most of them.
The general relationship between (rest) mass m, momentum p and energy E is this:
It is not. Kinetic energy and rest mass energy are two separate things.
The waves have different frequencies and different amplitudes, so changing either of these changes the information coming in. In practice, when we look at the world we see many different frequencies of light, with different levels of brightness.
Maybe. What do you mean by "processing the data", exactly?
Lots of additional "processing" of "data" happens in the brain.
As the combinations of light waves hitting out eyes vary in intensity and frequencies, our brains do interpret those changes in various ways. We infer motion from certain patterns of change, certainly.
Whichever you want. Or, more accurately, it depends on what aspect of the "hitting" you're trying to describe.
Colour is, more properly, the frequency of the light. There are complications, though. The colour purple is a mixture of different frequencies (red and blue). There is no "purple frequency".
Light does not have to eject electrons from atoms or molecules in order to have an effect on them.
It depends what kind of light you're talking about. Light of a single, constant frequency carries no information. It can't be used to transmit any kind of message from one place to another. To transmit a message, some aspect of the light has to vary with time.
You're talking about sensory information? Most human beings rely extensively on their sense of sight, of course, but we have other senses.
You still need a brain to make any sense of that perfect image.
There are sources of light. There are objects that reflect light. The eyes collect emitted and reflected light. The retina converts detected light into electrical signals, which the brain interprets.
The information of everything it has reflected off is not retained by the light. Each detected photon only carries information about whatever it was that emitted it, most recently.
I'll just record my agreement with all of the other people here who have explained to you that you're using the word "hallucinate" incorrectly.
"Hallucinated" is the wrong word. Our concious perceptions are constructed by the brain, certainly, but perceptions based on real external events (such as light hitting the retina of the eye) are not hallucinations.
It depends what you mean by "accurate". Your TV set only has three kinds of coloured LEDs: red, green and blue. Nevertheless, it can fool your brain into seeing 16 million+ colours.
That's not what "hallucination" means. None of our senses provide "direct" information, in the way you're using that term.
That's a very strange thing to say. Science is in the business of examining natural phenomena and trying to explain them. It is an empirical endeavour.
What "phenomenal content" is there, other than that which we can observe? What are you talking about?
No. Scientific theories of colour (as opposed merely to the properties of light) are necessarily concerned with how we perceive things, which necessitates a consideration of mental processes.
Red light and the human perception of red are two different things. Science has investigated both of them.
When you see a red rose, there is light reflecting off the rose that produces a particular sensory experience in your brain. There is an unbroken chain of causation from the photons coming off the rose to your eventual conscious perception of its red colour.
Science posits many things that are not directly accessible to our senses. We cannot see electrons, for instance. However, we can still infer their existence by performing certain experiments and interpreting the results.
Yes, sensations are generated by our brains. That's why they are called sensations: they require our senses and they require our consciousness.
We humans are an inherent trait of the physical universe. Our vision is what it is. I don't believe anybody said it was "necessary" to be that way, rather than some other way.
Do you want to compare your separate subjective perceptions of the colour yellow? There's no way to do that directly.
We're all part of the objective physical world.
It depends what you mean when you say something is "colored". We can define yellow light to be light that contains photons in a particular range of wavelengths, for example. If we do that, then yellow photons are yellow photons, objectively distinguishable from red photons or blue photons.
Yes. Particular sensations don't exist until we experience them, and they go away when we're no longer experiencing them.
No. Red photons impinging on your eye won't usually cause the sensation of yellow, for instance. The sensation of yellow is most commonly produced by light in the world that has the appropriate properties to stimulate the correct brain cells etc.
If that were true, then it would be impossible to correlate subjective reports of colours with particular wavelengths of light. And yet, we can do that. There are repeatable correlations between the sensations people report and the objectively observable physical processes that are occurring.
Nobody claims that colour perception is due only to objective properties to be found in light. The clue is in the name: colour perception. You can't just ignore how the perception part is working.
Again, "hallucination" is the wrong word. Scientists have a good understanding of the physical reasons for why these kinds of complementary colour perceptions happen under the right conditions. It's partly due to the colour cones in the eye becoming 'saturated' and taking some time to regain their normal resting state.
Perhaps. But you should definitely stop using the word "hallucination", which is clearly an incorrect description of what is happening.
The molecules in the banana reflect light that is perceived as yellow. If you want to abbreviate that description, I guess you can say the molecules are yellow, because when we give the colour of something we're almost always implying something about the way it emits or reflects light or transmits light.
Voltage is a measure of energy per unit charge, which has nothing to do with colour, so no.
What do you understand by the term "qualia"? Can you show that qualia exist?
Most accurately, it is a key constituent of a theoretical model used to describe electromagnetic radiation.
There is a smallest unit of light possible at any given frequency. That unit is a photon. You can have 1 photon, or 7 photons or 500 billion photons, but you can't have 1.5 photons, or 6.8 photons or half a photon. The term "quanta" refers merely to this fact that that light comes in discrete units. There's nothing circular about that.
When it behaves in particle-like ways, it makes sense to refer to it as a particle.
In a sense, we already have. Our best models of matter and light have as their fundamental constituents quantum objects that, under suitable conditions, exhibit either the properties of macroscopic particles or waves. The term that is usually used for this is wave-particle duality.
QFT goes a step further, describing all particles as excitations of fields that pervade all of space.
The concept of a photon does not posit that photons light is made of energy, or that light is a "substance". There is nothing circular here, as long as you are careful to define terms like "matter" appropriately. Depending on how you define that term, it might be true to say that matters is made of quarks (in part) or, if you define it a different way, to say that quarks are a kind of matter. But again, there's nothing circular. One thing is defined in terms of the other, and the definition only goes in one direction, not in circles.
No. Particle models posit fundamental entities. Molecules are made of atoms, which are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Electrons aren't "made of" anything smaller. They are fundamental. Protons and neutrons are "made of" quarks, but quarks aren't "made of" anything smaller; they are fundamental.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Yes.
No. The clue is right there: "irreducible substrate". The regress stops right there. It goes in one direction only. There is no circularity.
It doesn't go both ways. It only goes one way. Particles are described as excitations of fields. Never the reverse. No circularity.
A different theory with a different irreducible substrate. Not "made of nothing". The strings are the irreducible substrate. They don't "reduce" to anything more basic. Understand? In this theory, there is nothing and there are strings. The strings aren't made of the nothing, any more than quarks are made of nothing in the Standard Model of particle physics.