Article says the ceasefire was originally planned for 4 days, so they made the hunger strike coincide with the end of the ceasefire. But then the ceasefire was extended. But they went ahead with hunger strike anyway? Ok…

Is this news current? Isn’t the conflict in like day 3 of ceasefire? Are they still on hunger strike?

Lie groups are my favorite thing in all of mathematics, and gauge theory is my favorite thing in physics. E8 and all its connections to other subjects is one example of how amazing this subject can be.

It would be a coup de grace of the highest order, just the crowning intellectual achievement of mankind, if we could stumble upon a theory of everything explaining the entire Standard Model, just by fiddling around with how to fit SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) fits inside E8 or whatever.

But I guess it’s not going to happen.

I’ll level with you. I know how to use QED to compute the cross section of a scattering reaction. But I do not remember, or perhaps never knew, what the QED theoretic description of classical wave mechanical phenomena like diffraction, reflection, refraction, and dispersion look like.

Well… actually of those phenomena, I think diffraction is fine. A single waveform will exhibit diffraction. It doesn’t entail any interactions. A single photon can still exhibit a diffraction pattern. It doesn’t mean that the photon has changed directions or circled around or in any way accelerated. The only reason you might think so is that you’re thinking of photons as billiard ball type classical particles, but of course they are not, they are quantum particles with spread out wavefunctions.

Dispersion I guess is just scattering combined with absorption re-emission (and as we discussed, even scattering is itself a form of absorption & re-emission). But as for reflection and refraction? Those are the phenomena that Entropius was pointing to elsewhere in this thread. I remember how those look in terms of solutions to Maxwell’s equations and boundary conditions, but that’s classical wave mechanics. I do not remember how to translate that into the language of QED.

QED is a fundamental theory, so I assume that a description exists, and of course because I know what QED looks like, so I am certain that it will still be true that in this description, photons will be absorbed & emitted by charged particles, but photons will not interact with photons. However beyond that I cannot say much. How do we describe reflection of light in a mirror as photons scattering off electrons? I don’t know exactly.

One thing I can say is that generally classical states are modeled in quantum mechanics as coherent states, which are eigenstates of the annihilation operator. They look something like exp(N)|0> where N is the number operator, which means that they are states with a superposition of 0 photons, 1 photons, 2 photons, etc. They don’t have a well defined number of particles. So maybe if you want a QED theoretic description of reflection, you can have it, but you won’t be able to talk about specific numbers of photons. But again, I don’t know the details of this.

I wonder whether this concept of classical waveforms as coherent states with a superposition of all numbers of particles will help at all with this philosophical debate about whether two photons are the same particle or not, or about whether you can have a universe with only 3 photons

Look bro. Your top level comment that I replied to was generally correct, and also very helpful. I liked it. I liked the suggestion for people to look at the Feynman diagrams. I agreed with it. I upvoted it.

I hope I’m not giving you the impression that I’m taking a personal issue with you. I’m not. I like you and I hope we’ll still be friends when this is all over. I promise to read Discworld soon.

The only quibble I had with what you wrote was this one sentence:

So for a photon to change course, aka accelerate, it does it by absorbing a virtual photon and emitting another.

Photons do not absorb virtual photons. And real on-shell photons do not interact. In Compton scattering and 1 loop photon-photon scattering, you can think of photons emitting e+e- pairs. But never do they emit or absorb other photons.

Maybe that’s not what you meant with that sentence, and I misunderstood. If that’s the case, my bad. Maybe you didn’t need the explanation. If someone else made the same misunderstanding reading your comment that I did, then maybe my comments will help them even if you don’t need them. Or if not, if it’s just me being dumb, well c’est la vie.

Cheers bro.

I am indeed denying the existence of photons interacting with virtual photons. I am also saying there is no tree level photon-photon interaction of on shell photons. Neither Compton scattering nor Bhabha nor pair production nor pair annihilation involves a photon-photon interaction. There is no photon-photon vertex in QED. There is no tree level Feynman diagram that you can look at and say “this is, at least philosophically, a photon changing its momentum”.

There is a 1 loop diagram that represents photon-photon scattering. But even that doesn’t have any photon-photon vertices, instead it is mediated by electron-positron pair.

Non-abelian gauge bosons (gluons) couple to themselves. So does gravity (gravitons). Abelian ones (photons) do not.

Photons don’t accelerate. They are emitted or absorbed. That’s their only interaction.

The electromagnetic field does have a force carrier. It is the photon.

The photon mediates the force between electrically charged particles. It cannot mediate any reaction between two neutral photons.

There is no tree level photon-photon interaction. Photons scatter off electrons (or any other charged particle), not off neutral photons.

Ok but photons don’t change direction either. Treating photon scattering as an individual particle accelerating due to an applied force, well that’s just not a correct description of how perturbative QED models photon interactions.

The fact that light cannot change speed is one of the core axioms of relativity

Photons cannot accelerate

The point wasn’t that ranged attacks or siege or cavalry weapons are more important than melee weapons, though depending on the battle or the century, that may well be true.

The point was that when it comes to melee, the weapons used by your infantry was never swords. Swords are prestige weapons, expensive and heavy, wielded by wealthy knights and nobility for ceremonial purposes, duels, or tournaments. The king cannot afford to equip a thousand infantry with swords (the way you see in movies like Braveheart or LotR), and even if he could, the infantrymen have neither the skill nor strength to wield them for an extended duration.

Swords weren’t the weapon of last resort. They just weren’t included in the loadout at all, of the soldiers engaging in melee combat. So what did they use? Spears. That’s probably why the OP says spears are king.

But take it with a grain of salt cause I don’t actually know anything about medieval warfare. It’s just a thing I heard.

Modern conceptions of medieval warfare drastically overestimate the amount of usage that swords saw in battle. At least that’s a thing I’ve heard.

the cheevos, for one

It was a joke, but you appear not to have gotten it. Hence the wooosh sound.

Wooosh

Sadly true. As a nose cutter I will say that I have found the transition from Twitter to mastodon far more painless than Reddit to lemmy