One-Man-Band simile

On today's (2011 06 19) online Los Angeles Times, saw photo of Glendale's Rose Parade float that won volunteers trophy, that I had done seaweed on boots of the "one-man-band" toy-like figurine and taught others to do seaweed decoration there too. 

I have a wall plaque showing another angle of this float, given to me in appreciation of being a "white coat" leader in the float's decoration that won the "Volunteer's Trophy" that year in the Rose Parade.


The implication of this float design is that the toy seems to be doing all the music, but only when pulled along by some larger exterior person, normally a small child pulling the toy by a string, instead of music by its own capability.

It had occurred to me at the time that my own space concepts like KESTS to GEO efforts were seen by some others as a "one man band" do-everything-alone activity, that due to my lack of advanced college degree or high corporate position, that I could not be doing those complex advanced space concepts by myself, but was really being pulled along by some exterior person.... thus all the accusing group had to do was "find out who, thus expose me" and thus restore their own college-degree-superiority credibility, on which their esteem and high paying jobs might seem based. Such a viewpoint seems to explain much of what I have experienced the past several decades.

And, it has seemed over these decades, that indeed I have to be a "one-man-band" since I have to figure out how to do everything myself, since I can get no one to help me. And my Asperger's affects probably look a bit robot-like to the average person, adding to the simile in onlooker's eyes. Thus I only get scornful derision for my huge efforts to help humanity; probably because it somehow "pushes their ego buttons."

Well, I had the choice: to sit on my hands and do nothing to help; or else do my best despite the lack of help or appreciation of my efforts to help civilization. I chose to keep on keeping on.

A motionless photon?

I just read a new science article that jarred my sense of reality: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/330958/title/Wave_function_directly_measured_ where an experiment "eliminates all photons that were moving, leaving only the photons that were still."

Reading that image, of a photon being still, motionless, really got to me. Retracing my mental steps, I realized that my concept of a photon implicitly required it to be moving, and moving at the speed of light in the medium within which it is traveling at the time. How could it be motionless?

I suppose that a photon could be perceived as motionless by an object moving in parallel path alongside it also at the speed of light. Which seems to mean only seen as motionless by another photon. Maybe then measuring the parallel photon one could determine what it "saw" of the first photon. But this leads into foggy thinking land. Not likely.

I then realized that my concept of a photon was that it was a thing that has its motion at the velocity of light, as part of what it is. It is an ever-swapping exchange of electric and magnetic fields ever going in some direction and it happens at the speed of light; being light, of course. Velocity is part of what it is. Presumably the vectors of the electric and magnetic fields define its direction and velocity. All a package.

And since electric fields and magnetic fields are things that exist spread out beyond the point of concentration, so also the individual photon is spread out; the wave function thing. As the photon tools along swapping its energy back and forth between electrostatic and electromagnetic fields, the rate of swapping back and forth defines its energy content but not its speed.

A motionless photon? The very idea just warranted a blog post to help soothe my sense of the rightness of the Universe, or something like that.