What is energy made of? When someone says “that has potential energy”, or “electrical energy” or “nuclear energy”, you know exactly what they mean, but what is energy actually made of? Can you extract energy from some action and show it to someone? Can you draw energy? Possibly a silly question… – maybe “energy” is an example of a “meta-attribute” (something which does not physically exist, but only exists in context)
Why does refraction happen?The usually metaphor used to describe refraction is a model car rolling along on a smooth surface like Lino, and encountering a rougher surface such as carpet, at an angle. Because a car is multi-dimensional in shape, part of the car will move onto the carpet before the rest, which causes that part to slow down, which causes the entire car to turn towards that side of the car (thus, the car is “refracted” by the carpet). Light, however, is usually portrayed as a single point which is travelling really fast. Does a point have sides? When entering a refractive object, can part of a photon be said to be “in” the slower medium, while the rest is still outside? If so, then I understand refraction, but it seems to me that light needs to be explained a bit more clearly in school…
Is the speed of light a constant or not? There have been reports of scientists recently slowing light to a crawl. Surely, that makes the speed of light a variable? Or, is c (the letter used to describe light-speed in physics) not actually “the speed of light”, but “the maximum speed of light”?
When approaching the speed of light, does “time” actually slow? It seems to me that if the speed of light is the fastest speed possible, then that can cause perceived time dilation while moving, without inventing actual malleable time. For instance, imagine a simple action such as passing a cup from one hand to another. Easy – takes a second. However, imagine you are now sitting in a spaceship travelling at the speed of light. Logically, you cannot now pass a cup from hand to hand, as simple vector math will show that be doing that, the cup will actually be travelling faster than c. Similarly, if perceived time depends on, say, an electron “ticking” around an atom, then at the speed of light, time must seem to stop altogether, as the electron will not be able to orbit the atom, as part of that orbit will be travelling faster than c. (similarly, as you /approach/ c, time will appear to “slow down”, when in fact, it just takes longer to perform any task, including thinking)
Am I wrong? Enquiring minds want to know…