09/10/2023
Disclaimer (pretty general obvious stuff, only the last paragraph has any actual info): Everything I say comes from education and experimentation though I am human and reserve the right to be wrong for many reasons, but my intention is to be very carefully accurate about what us humans do know and dont know about light, and I really do not know a lot of what humans do and dont know about it in many ways. Also, I am far far far from an expert. I am merely an astute and avid student, always. Anything I say is conditioned by exploration and realizations that are not a destination, but a journey for which others may have traveled further than I and many I could never catch, especially without them teaching me in writings, videos, or in person. I perpetually learn more and adapt or upgrade my understandings. So remember, all of this is my understanding at the time I wrote it and at any moment I may be proven wrong and with sufficient evidence will change my perspective/claims etc.
Secondly, much of this is a "best guess" by me or others I have learned from. But all of it has at least not been "disproven" by research or data to the best of my knoweldge. Generally if I am walking off into the realm of conjecture it should be perfectly clear that it is conjecture in nature or that I will describe it as conjecture. Conjectures are mine alone and experts may know better than me or Im just not up to date on the huge amount of research always being done on light. A "conclusion" in the scientific method is far different from raw data. Conclusions involve human conjecture and as such can be fallible, the worst and least know problem with using the scientific method to "prove" things. However, I have no duck in the game. I have no reputation to ruin, grants to jeopardize, nor money to be made off what I share with you. I have no conflict of interest and am light heartedly discussing something I do research, even professionally, but only to find the truth and help humans in general and singly understand reality and improve the human condition with the truth.
A photon is the "size" of a mathematical point. A zeroth dimensional object. In other words, it is no larger than a planck distance in any dimension 1.6 x 10-35 metres, and at smallest possibility has zero height, length, or depth. This makes it hard to study and hard to measure individually. Not to mention it is very fast, the fastest thing we know of for certain, by degrees of magnitude. It seems highly unlikely that anything of much mass can even approach 0.1% the speed of light.
First I would like to point out that there are not just 2 basic "things" in the universe, but 3. The classic false dichotomy "is it matter or is it energy" is just that, a false dichotomy. It is neither, though may have some similarities to either under certain perspective. It is its own thing, a third thing. So to start, the 3 fundamental "building blocks" or categories of "things" in the universe are 3 - matter, energy, and light.
Now this can be misleading in some regard because when a photon is absorbed there is a transfer of energy. This has masked from many the reality that light is neither matter nor energy, but is its own thing with its own characteristics.
Photons (light) is forever tied to electrons. They have something (a lot) to do with their emission, absorption, and re-emission. However, there are other sources for their initial emission - for example nuclear fusion and fission. Now that also might be tied somehow to nuclear material akin to electrons, but that gets into conjecture on my part.
Electrons are 10^-18 meters in diameter, arguably, so we are again dealing with things very hard to measure and maintain accurate data on. I think at this point you get the idea of the hardships we are dealing with to simply understand or "see" what these things truly are, how they behave, and more to the point "why" they do what they do.
It can be asserted that a photon travels at the speed of light at all times (varies slightly in various density of space or local material) and goes from point A (emission) to point B (absorption) without interference in as straight a line as reality can have. They do not individually turn or bend or reflect or even refract. Any change in velocity (direction) is arguably a point of absorption and re-emission.
There is one major problem with this and that is probably the one major problem with our understanding of photons altogether, the discussion of which comes much later after I have discussed most other things I know about photons. I have no way to reconcile the "Double Slit" experiment with all my other understandings of light. So keep that in mind. It also basically debunks almost everything I am going to say about photons, so... Ya. Anyone who says they know everything about or how photons really work is full of garbage. We dont. That is the simple answer. But I am presenting the best model that fits all other data and experiments except this one. Get back to that at the end.
Photons have zero mass. Period. They are either the dimension of the Plank distance (the real "zero") or have zero dimension altogether. They have NO volume and NEVER displace each other, energy, or mass. In some theory two photons could literally occupy the same exact space. This means that they have zero mass, however, they do take energy to generate (emit) and when absorbed they release that exact same amount of energy. This is often called a "packet"of energy. That energy can be determined by the measured wavelength (in our eye the wavelength is interpreted as color, while the # of photons being absorbed at a given length of time is "intensity"). Wavelength is inversely related to frequency.
Now, these terms are long established from a serious misunderstanding about light. That being the school of science from the 1700s and 1800s that thought light was a wave of energy like a sound wave, or an explosion, or a vibration in the ground. This has since been disproven - 1. each photon holds energetic integrity until absorbed whereas a 'wave' of energy can be 'diffused' into many atoms, with no real transitional issues and recombined into a single atom. 2. Waves travel relatively slowly, at the speed the atoms themselves travel, and cannot travel outside of atoms or plasma matter. They are contained within the matter and only transferred to other matter via charge contact. They are always transferred from molecule to molecule or mass to mass. Light needs none of this to travel or transfer. 3. Light will travel without a "medium" to travel through. A medium is matter in the form of a liquid, gas, plasma, or solid and even superposition mediums like a super dense solid or a super heated gas. Molecules of many types have been forced with high pressure and temperature into many different configurations like supersolids and super heated gases etc. It gets really strange and breaks the classic idea that there are 3 states of matter plus plasma. There are as much as 27 states of just water that we have found in laboratory and on some level a person even begins to wonder if the whole visualization we have created of the "states of matter" is just a human farce to help us categorize macroscale observations in our day-to-day. Reality is far more complicated than our senses demonstrate, but in measurable ways, thank goodness.
So light is too fast to be a 'wave' and too independent to be a wave of just energy. It needs nothing else to exist, just like mass, but it is massless.
