Is there a physicist in the house?

[two sheds]

So you're saying that "energy itself" is continuous but that some mechanism quantises photons, energy levels in atoms' electron orbitals, etc, etc.?

If you elucidated that mechanism, you'd have completed the task I set

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Yep - what quantises photons is Et=h. If you put a photon in a 1-D (or 3-D) box it acts like a vibrating string with quantised frequencies, but that's only because you've put it in a box and so limited the frequencies it can have.

That isn't a mechanism admittedly. I could give you a mechanism, but it would involve the aether. (“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, “I kept all my limbs very supple. By the use of this ointment – one shilling the box –  Allow me to sell you a couple?”)

But what would "energy itself", independent of any actual (quantised) phenomenon (such as a photon), be?

As far as I know energy only appears in photons apart from when it is locked up in particles.

Interestingly, the most interesting alternatives to the mess that is string theory (Loop Quantum Gravity and Causal dynamical triangulations) start from saying: "let's see what happens if we take everything as quantised".

ta - i'll have a look at them.

They build spacetime - and thus energy - out of, er, abstract quantised geometry - rather than assuming there's a "background" of something called "space" on which a geometry is superimposed.

Not that I really understand the abstract quantised geometry of which you speak, but it actually sounds a bit like the Aether

 

[laptop]

Not that I really understand the abstract quantised geometry of which you speak, but it actually sounds a bit like the Aether

I've been struggling to come up with a plain-English description of what they're on about for a couple of years now, including a headache-inducing correspondence with a mathematician

The mental picture I get from the mathematicians' descriptions of what they did at work today does seem an uncanny "rhyme" with the spring-and-weight model of the Late Victorian Aether

 

[two sheds]

I've been struggling to come up with a plain-English description of what they're on about for a couple of years now, including a headache-inducing correspondence with a mathematician

The mental picture I get from the mathematicians' descriptions of what they did at work today does seem an uncanny "rhyme" with the spring-and-weight model of the Late Victorian Aether

Spring-and-weight model does sort of explain gravity, and it's easy enough to update it to explain electromagnetic effects. Maxwell believed in the aether when he developed his laws, and Einstein wasn't averse to the idea either.

Can i send you my introduction? Can i? Pretty please?