In 1900, the German physicist Max Planck was studying black-body radiation, and he suggested that the experimental observations, specifically at shorter wavelengths, would be explained if the energy stored within a molecule was a “discrete quantity composed of an integral number of finite equal parts”, which he called “energy elements”. In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper in which he proposed that many light-related phenomena—including black-body radiation and the photoelectric effect—would be better explained by modelling electromagnetic waves as consisting of spatially localized, discrete wave-packets. He called such a wave-packet a light quantum.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon (20Jun24)
Photon energy is the energy carried by a single photon. The amount of energy is directly proportional to the photon’s electromagnetic frequency and thus, equivalently, is inversely proportional to the wavelength. The higher the photon’s frequency, the higher its energy. Equivalently, the longer the photon’s wavelength, the lower its energy… The photon energy at 1 Hz is equal to 6.62607015×10−34 J
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_energy (20Jun24)
The SI units are defined in such a way that, when the Planck constant is expressed in SI units, it has the exact value h = 6.62607015×10−34 J⋅Hz−1.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant (20Jun24)
The meaning of the foregoing should be clear. Despite the claims of particle physicists that the photon is a particle, it was in its original conception and is in its current quantitative description a wave phenomenon. A photon is not a particle like a proton or a billiard ball. A photon is never at rest with respect to any material body; it is always moving at the local speed of light with respect to all material bodies. A photon does not behave like a three dimensional particle, it is a wave quantum.
A wave quantum is the smallest possible wave; it is a wave of one wavelength as defined above. The illustration below is of a wave consisting of two consecutive photons. This is a poor representation of the reality of electromagnetic radiation which on astronomical and cosmological scales is emitted omni-directionally by stars, galaxies and other luminous bodies. To a local observer though light arriving from a distance seems to consist of streams or rays of light. This image is of a subsection of such a stream.
Electromagnetic radiation does not consist of a stream of tiny particles simply because Max Planck was forced to treat the emission of light as having a discrete minimum. What is described by the math is a single wavelength which is the minimum for a wave of any frequency. Half waves and quarter waves etc. don’t exist.
That does not mean a wave with half the wavelength of a longer wave cannot exist, just that for any given frequency a single complete wave cycle of one wavelength defines the minimum wave energy. Converting this wave minimum to a “particle” was a categorical error and it has a formal name, QED or Quantum Electrodynamics.
In Richard Feynman’s 1985 book QED, based on four popular lectures he had given a few years earlier, he makes this rather odd case for the light as particle “theory:
The strange phenomenon of partial reflection by two surfaces can be explained for intense light by a theory of waves, but the wave theory cannot explain how the detector makes equally loud clicks as the light gets dimmer. Quantum electrodynamics “resolves” this wave-particle duality by saying that light is made of particles (as Newton originally thought) but the price of this great advancement of science is a retreat by physics to the position of being able to calculate only the probability that a photon will hit a detector, without offering a good model of how it actually happens.
So to summarize that last sentence, saying light is made of particles was a great advancement for science that represented a retreat by physics into incoherence. I can’t argue with that. It is also not clear why the particle theory is superior to the wave quantum understanding of Einstein. Surely wave mechanics could have been modified to accommodate the fact that one wavelength is the minimum wave.
Instead Feynman goes on to describe a strange system resembling vector addition where the direction of “arrows” representing possible particle paths is determined by a frequency counter clock, in a backdoor maneuver to introduce wave-like behavior into the particle model so it can mimic wave interference patterns. This fits nicely with the standard quantum babble about a superposition of states, the condition where a particle’s position cannot be predicted except as a probability distribution which is interpreted to mean that the particle is in many positions at once. Thus the retreat into incoherence.
The particle theory of light is just another screwup of 20th century theoretical physics (there were quite a few). It should be put on the historical-curiosity shelf along with the Big Bang next to geocentric cosmology. Future historians can point to these physically absurd dead-end theories as textbook examples of how not to do science. Theory driven physics always winds up as empirically baseless metaphysical nonsense; the human imagination has never been a good guide to physical reality.
Yes, photons are not particles, photons are waves of super fluid space – ether. This article is excellent. And the Big Bang model is not science, it is pseudoscience. Universe is eternal, black holes are rejuvenating systems of the universe.
Comments are closed where you talk about time, I hope you don’t mind a late comment, just as you posted one for another blog. You say:
“[…] there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support the view that time and space are independent entities.”
Its implications are often ignored, but across the universe, dust grains that move differently will age at different rates, leaving permanent age differences between them, potentially visible from any viewpoint. It happens constantly everywhere. That sure makes time look like an independent entity, and not just a relational thing, only to do with how we measure things. This inconvenient fact is usually made to seem like an exotic rare exception, with the twins paradox, but it’s a vital clue about time.