The photon

The photon has a wave nature, which is why we can refract and diffract light. But what sort of a wave nature? When you try to find a picture, a lot of illustrations depict the photon as some kind of wave train. Even Feynman diagrams do this. Image by bitwise, see Wikipedia commons The photon is shown as a squiggly line, sometimes with an arrowhead, something like this: ⇝. That suggests you could split a photon lengthwise and end up with two photons, each with the…

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What is a photon?

OK, so quantum electrodynamics is said to date from 1929 when it was the same thing as quantum field theory. However it immediately suffered from the “problem of infinities”. So much so that some say most workers in the field doubted its correctness, whilst others say physicists believed a conceptual change was needed. As to what, see the conceptual foundations and the philosophical aspects of renormalization theory by Tian Yu Cao and Silvan Schweber dating from 1993. They say QFT embodies a reductionist view, but “serious doubt has often been cast on the…

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