>To Jim, keep going. I'm glad to see someone who doesn't automatically accept a simple solution because it is simple or popular.
>James
>Ok, who put "Uninflamable" signs on gasoline tanker trucks?
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In regard to the "photon" as a unit and how "heat" is transferred:
Take a rifle and fire a round at a heavy steel plate 100 yards away. At impact, the bullet will not retain its mass, its geometry and perfectly recoil back to your rifle, go up the barrel and reseat itself in the brass cartridge. Instead, the bullet will shatter into many pieces going in many directions at various speeds. The mass and the geometry of the bullet will not be conserved; they will be dispersed. The kinetic energy of the bullet will also be dispersed, with some of it becoming "heat" within the steel plate. This is entropy.
Now lets go to the photon. A photon is a human mental construct which is highly misleading because of it being interpreted as a particle. In the light carrying medium, you have waves. When a wave impacts against a molecule, the amount of wave energy taken in by the molecule is determined by the nature of the molecule. This amount of energy becomes dispersed by the molecule into a re-emitted wave of lesser energy, some translational energy, some rotating energy, some vibrational energy, perhaps a rise in electron energy, etc. The point is that the incoming energy gets dispersed. How the energy is dispersed will vary from molecule to molecule, depending on the status of each particular molecule.
When you measure this behavior with an instrument, the measure is a macroscopy average of countless millions of molecules over a long duration of time - long duration relative to a single molecular event.
Your measurement says that molecular nitrogen responds to a particular frequency of light in a certain way - on average. You don't measure a single event.
Gregg Wilson
