Most EM courses do a cute dance around the topic of photons, and I haven't taken any higher level QM courses yet. What's the deal??Like why can you just "make" a photon appear by spending energy?? How do you explain EM stuff with photons? Like I have an antenna, and its putting out a spherical, continuous (?) wavefront. Do they actually move like a particle and obey some matter-wave abomination? How does the varying EM fields factor into that?Are photons real or just a math trick? And if they are, is the dog wagging the tail or is the tail wagging the dog?
>>16968530Think of a photon as a data packet, like in a computer network. It's a discrete chunk of information. It's not a particle or a wave, it just has properties that are found in things that we describe as particles or waves, but it makes absolutely no sense if you treat it as just one or the other.
>>16968530They're real. They move like a particle. Classical em fields are approximations of superpositions of many photons.
You need to study QM for the correct answer. For concrete evidence of photons being real, look up antibunching.
Microbubbles from focused external universal forces. You could look at the universe with a fly's eye.
>>16968530Apply QM to a field and now the wave modes of the field have energy levels. That's photons, and every other particle.
