Photons, friction, and collision events

I've been re-reading a lot of these threads lately trying to get back up to speed, and something occurred to me last night during a conversation with my younger, unRead brother.

Would our quantum particle (the photon) be the smallest particle that doesn't experience friction in a collision? Do all other larger particles (nucleus-sized and beyond) experience some amount of friction in a collision, but the photon/electron/proton/neutron do not, since there's no "noise" to their surface to "snag" or cause any friction?

We were discussing the matter-anti-matter interaction while reading a recent silly mainstream-science article on the topic, which admitted to having made multiple mistakes and many discrepancies in the experiment. I said to my brother, who refuses to read Mathis, that it's not an annihilation, but simply a vector change of, say, a positron colliding with an electron. That got us to discussing collision events, the most simple of course being a direct N to S pole direct collision.

I'm assuming there's no friction at the photon level. Does that make sense? It's only important when I'm adjusting parameters inside Maya, such as friction, drag, bounce, attenuation, etc.

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Hi Jared, I've thought about this too. In all the collision models I’ve looked at, there is always a coefficient of friction or a coefficient of restitution. Essentially, these coefficients describe the energy efficiency, transferred/lost in a collision.

In my opinion, B-photons always collide with 100% efficiency, i.e. no losses. Higher A or X,Y, and Z particles will transfer less than 100% energy since some of the energy of the collision may be lost by interaction with a few of either particle's individual recycling photons and so not all energy is exchanged between the charged particles themselves.
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That seems to follow. So as we approach the electron and above, the propensity to have other, smaller photons interfere increases? Not quite like friction, but the net results may be similar?

It seems reasonable that a simple, purely spherical object (made of whatever photons are made of) with no potential smaller sub-particles available would have nothing to "stick" to its surface to cause any friction. Even the poly-spheres I often use in my vidoes would have some friciton, since they have edges and flats.

I'm working up a video with a bit more clarity using NURBS spheres instead, which are (mathematically) clean, to kinda analyze this interaction a bit better for me, so we can start plugging those collision maths from your other thread into my program too. Might make a difference in accuracy. I need to be able to teach Maya to handle collisions properly, you know? The built-in engine is meant more for film and video game effects, and has nothing built-in for stacked spins or quantum collisions.

In our discussions with Michael Vicatis (not sure I spelled that right, sorry Michael) he kept insisting that everything has friction and it is hard to counter.

Friction is a loss of energy during a collision. Any loss of energy is a gain of energy to something else. When discussing BPhoton to BPhoton collisions, there is nothing else to transfer that energy to. We can't assume a BPhoton is compressible, which would indicate the energy is spent in that deformation, and we know that they maintain their linear velocity of c, so they don't lose it that way either. We can say that photons have internal spins and they can absorb some of that energy, but we can't say that about BPhotons.

I expect that a true spin collision model will not need to deal with friction as it will naturally arise at the necessary scale, through lower level collisions.

That seems a very rational and acceptable description of friction, Nevyn. Thanks for sharing that. I must have missed the conversation with Michael (if it was here, anyway), but again that's a nice clean definition and is very helpful.

I'll keep it out of my simple sims for now, unless we go higher than the electron or so.

Here are a couple of links to the Michael Vaicaitis model (and I did spell it wrong).

https://milesmathis.forumotion.com/t69-michael-vaicaitis-model-discussions

https://milesmathis.forumotion.com/t88-michael-vaicaitis-model

There is some really good stuff in those discussions. They were done through a chat room, so they are a little different to our normal posts, but worth a read through every now and again. I wonder what he's up to now?

You all might take a look at these graphene and friction links. This is still a fresh area of research -- are B-Photons extremely unpolished gears?
(So.....unpolished B-Photons would have less friction than polished photons???)

https://www.materialstoday.com/materials-chemistry/news/uncovering-friction-properties-in-graphene/

http://news.mit.edu/2016/sliding-flexible-graphene-surfaces-1123

“There is this broad notion in tribology that friction depends on the true contact area,” Li says — that is, the area where two materials are really in contact, down to the atomic level. The “true” contact area is often substantially smaller than it would otherwise appear to be if observed at larger size scales. Determining the true contact area is important for understanding not only the degree of friction between the pieces, but also other characteristics such as the electrical conduction or heat transfer.

For example, explains co-author Robert Carpick of the University of Pennsylvania, “When two parts in a machine make contact, like two teeth of steel gears, the actual amount of steel in contact is much smaller than it appears, because the gear teeth are rough, and contact only occurs at the topmost protruding points on the surfaces. If the surfaces were polished to be flatter so that twice as much area was in contact, the friction would then be twice as high. In other words, the friction force doubles if the true area of direct contact doubles.”

But it turns out that the situation is even more complex than scientists had thought. Li and his colleagues found that there are also other aspects of the contact that influence how friction force gets transferred across it. “We call this the quality of contact, as opposed to the quantity of contact measured by the ‘true contact’ area,” Li explains.

Coverage on the Quality paper:
https://www.materialstoday.com/computation-theory/news/quality-more-important-for-graphene-friction/