On Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 3:20:23 PM UTC, John Clark wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 5:40 PM <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > > *> the concept of a plane wave, one of the solutions of Maxwell's >> equations. It certainly doesn't exist in THIS universe* > > > I agree with the general point you're trying to make, just because > something can be consistently described mathematically doesn't prove it > must exist physically. However if you're interested in the waves that enter > your radio telescope and consider them to be plane waves the error in doing > so can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the distance from the point > source or by decreasing the size of the antenna. As a practical matter > because the things astronomers study are so distant and their antennas are > so small they can treat the waves they're interested in as plane waves and > produce no measurable error by doing so. But a designer of optical > microscopes would not have that luxury because the lens of a microscope is > large compared to the distance from the sample, so he could not treat them > as plane waves. > > John K Clark >
*A spherical wave asymptotically approaches a plane wave as it progresses in space and time, but it never becomes a plane wave. This where the rubber hits the road for the MUH; we have a mathematical construct that doesn't exist in physical reality. Moreover, since the amplitude along the wave front is a plane, the wave changes instantaneously in every direction along the plane for every increment of time however small, which I refer to as "instantaneous with a vengeance". So, as far as I am concerned the MUH is easily falsified, and why it continues to interest people is baffling. AG* > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
