Argued the idea and lost

I found a place where I could argue the idea but lost the argument.   There were over 100 posts.   To me the best arguments against this theory were that laser light entering a vacuum does not have enough electrons but does not in fact push any electrons from mater into the vacuum.  The other very convincing one is that a vacuum tube can have a positive plate to absorb electrons and yet still stay perfectly transparent.

I came up with a couple arguments that I like.  One was that relativity links electricity and magnetism so an electromagnetic wave does need moving electrons.     I also argued by looking at Maxwell's equations.  Some of these are talking about charges and currents and a light wave passes an atom so fast that only the electron could have any significant movement.   I may make a post on each of these.   Nobody bought either argument and they even had a good counterargument to the second, that some energy should be lost to the proton.  After it was all over it occurred to me that the electrons movement could cancel out the field from the view of the proton.  So it really could be that the proton was not moved.

One claim was that only whole photons are absorbed but this is not true.  You can get part of the energy from a photon and that just lowers the frequency of the photon.  This is in my list of experiments.

Anyway, it was an interesting debate for me.

How best to proceed?

What is the best way to test the idea that electromagnetic waves are using electrons as the medium for transmission?    Here are some ideas:

1. One big question is if there really is enough matter in space to transmit the wave.   One way to test this is to simulate waves going through space using dipole approximation.  If waves can word at such low density of matter it would be big support for the electron waves theory.
2. Put out prizes to see if anyone can come up with any experiment showing either magnetic or electric fields that are clearly not involving electrons.  This theory holds that all electromagnetic waves are propagated by electrons, so any experiment where this was not so would falsify this theory.
3. Explore bursts of laser light going into vacuum.  There are experiments and papers on this.  Results do not seem to fit with this hypothesis. 
4. Simulate atoms and see if we can get a very directional wave that fits photon experiments as well as wave experiments.
5. Show that photons are really waves by making an experiment that takes off part of the energy at a time.  There are already experiments like this though.
6. Try to do or find experiments that show that the maximum energy density that can be transmitted in a vacuum, without loss due to ionization, goes down with particle density. 
   

Quotes from wise men

Maxwell said, “The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.” 

Also Maxwell, "We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomenon.”    Page 500 in James Clerk Maxwell scientific papers.

Newton said, "I do not know what this Aether is", but that if it consists of particles then they must be "exceedingly smaller than those of Air, or even than those of Light: The exceeding smallness of its Particles may contribute to the greatness of the force by which those Particles may recede from one another, and thereby make that Medium exceedingly more rare and elastick than Air"


Observing that his equations represented periodic electric currents at right angles to the direction of propagation of the disturbance, Lorentz suggested that all luminous vibrations might be constituted by electric currents and hence that there was “no longer any reason for maintaining the hypothesis of an aether, since we can admit that space contains sufficient ponderable matter to enable the disturbance to be propagated.” 
 

Einstein said, "This double nature of radiation (and of material corpuscles)...has been interpreted by quantum-mechanics in an ingenious and amazingly successful fashion. This interpretation...appears to me as only a temporary way out..."

Speed of light

If light is a wave and electrons are the medium, the speed of a light is a consequence of the forces between electrons and the inertia of the electrons.  In different types of matter, where electrons are more or less free to move the speed of light is different.

It seems like the forces between the electrons would have to have a higher speed of propagation than light so that after the inertia is overcome the speed of the wave would be the speed of light.

One objection I get is "to get electrons moving at the speed of light would take infinite energy".  This comes from the mistaken idea that if the wave is propagating at the speed of light then the particles in the medium have to move at that speed.   You can see that this is not so by looking at a tsunami wave in water.  The water molecules move slowly yet the wave may be moving at 600 MPH.  Also, light is a transverse wave, not a longitudinal wave like sound.   So the medium is not moving in the direction the wave is moving.  The electrons do not need to move at the speed the wave moves at.  An even better example is that electricity propagates down a wire at the speed of light even though the electrons in the wire are not moving very fast.

Electrons in atoms as medium for light

An atom where an electric field can stretch electrons off to one side a bit can become a dipole, these are called Dielectric.   Energy is stored in the stretching of the position of the electrons.  Atoms that are forced into a dipole are also sometimes said to be polarized.   In the plane wave there is a whole volume of atoms with electrons moving up.  This volume of electrons going up is like a current and produces a magnetic field around it.  A half wavelength away the electrons are going down.  It produces a magnetic field around it.  In between the two magnetic fields add together.   You can also think of it as in between it is like electrons are moving around that spot and electrons going in a circle make a magnetic field.

As the electromagnetic wave moves the electric field and magnetic field are off by 90 degrees to each other and the direction the wave is moving.  They are also out of phase by 90 degrees.   

Atoms with free electrons, that conduct electricity, do not propagate electromagnetic waves well.

Atoms where the electrons can move at the right frequency can conduct light of that frequency.

It makes sense that much solid matter, where electron bonds are such that the can not move so freely, do not propagate light that humans can see.  We needed to see the solid objects and we don't need to see the air.