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An interesting thing about photons (which may not be true, I just enjoy this stuff amateurishly, that is, without the effort or rigor to actually understand it.
by somat 2y ago
An interesting thing about photons (which may not be true, I just enjoy this stuff amateurishly, that is, without the effort or rigor to actually understand it.) is that they might not exist. the em field is not quantized, or at least is not quantized at the level of photons. A "photon" only exists where the em field interacts with matter, where the electrons that create the disturbance can only pulse in discrete levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExhSqq1jysg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExhSqq1jysg
Not that this changes anything, we can only detect or create light with matter. but it does make me curious about single photon experiments and what they are actually measuring.
- leetrout 2y agoThanks for the link. I never conceptualized photons outside of the visual spectrum so the headline made me take a step back and get nerd sniped in the process. I stumbled upon this before seeing your comment: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90646/what-is-the-relation-between-electromagnetic-wave-and-photon https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90646/what-is-th...
- golergka 2y agoIsn't that simply the principle of particle-wave duality? When particle/wave in field X interacts with field X, it behaves like a wave, but interactions with other fields are quantised.
- mr_toad 2y agoExistence is a difficult concept for something moving at the speed of light. Light follows a null geodesic through space-time with zero (space-time) length and no proper time. Past, future, and causality have no meaning to a photon. We think of photons travelling through space because our symmetry is broken, we have mass, and we and experience time and space. Observers like us will see light follow the same world-line from its source to its target. It cannot interact with anything else, and some might say it was only ever emitted so that it could interact with its target. So from a certain point of view the “existence” of a photon is entirely bound up in its interaction with source and target, and it’s not really useful to speak of it in other terms. The quantised interaction is the photon.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- immibis 2y agohttps://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/752390/double-slit-experiment-how-do-we-know-the-particle-effect-comes-from-the-nature https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/752390/double-sl...