Radio waves propagate spherically, how comes the photon moves in a straight line

[MrAl]

Here's a little question: We can feel light as heat, we can certainly see light of certain frequencies, but does light have any unique taste?  I think the secondary senses would come from the interaction of light with objects, creating sound, taste, smell, etc.

Well consider when you pick up a flower and touch it petals and sniff it's fragrance... that nothing every "touches" the flower.  The replulse of the electron concentrations at the surface of the flower and your hand repel so completely you can never actually touch the flower.  The particles of things you smell, dont really "touch" anything either.  They get molecularly bonded via electrons of molcules in your sense organs which creates a chemical signal by it's presence which signals your brain.

A more interesting question is ... if you put 1000V across the brain and slam every electrical potential into the extreme, distrupting every electrical circuit that exists in there for a breif period...  the brain simply reboots as if nothing happened.  The electro-chemical balance is fascinating how that works.  It leaves you wondering if the other way around is possible.  Not with disrupted electric fields, but with temporarily removed chemical constructs.  Can it ... ie. you... be even termporarily "operated" outside of the brain.

Looking more carefully this morning with my eyes open I see I owe you an apology.
I addressed you as Paula not Paul.
The fault was entirely mine, I hope you weren't offended.
Procedures on this site are far more tricky than I am used to.

Back to basics:
Waves and particles are analogies from macroscopic physics, using similar mathematics to waves on water and collisions of billiard balls.

Yes, and that's what ultimately creates all the confusion. If someone says light behaves like particles, there is some truth to it, but then without understanding where this behaviour exactly/to our best knowledge comes from, it is easy to extrapolate that therefore all the properties of classical particles must also somehow apply to light. But then it is immediately refuted by interference, which is easy to extrapolate to classical waves, but it is obviously wrong again, because how can the delocalized energy in a classical wave suddenly disappear to a localized region.

So actually for better understanding it is necessary to study the underlying theory, not be side-tracked too much about those analogies.

From what I have read over the years the progress has gone from:
(1) not knowing what light was, to (2) the classical wave analogy, to (3) thinking of it as a quanta (which gets confused with a particle), to (4) being both a wave and a particle, to (5) a quantum object that has some nonclassical behavior.

So the poor light thing gets a bad rap all along the way
Maybe it is hinting at us: "you don't know what the heck I am so forget about it", ha ha.

Which brings me to the question, Does anyone actually know what light actually is?  We just have our human understanding of something we just happened to run across in our history and that means we are always using some kind of heuristic whether we like it or not.

Maybe the most amazing thing about it is that it can transfer a lot of energy from one place to another.  We are accustomed to using flashlights and candles, which provide a very gentle blanket of light on the subject.  But look at the light from a star, or the light from a supernova, which can mean either long life or quick death.

The universe is an amazing place, but also very deadly.  We have been lucky so far.

Here's a little question: We can feel light as heat, we can certainly see light of certain frequencies, but does light have any unique taste?  I think the secondary senses would come from the interaction of light with objects, creating sound, taste, smell, etc.

In electronics we use many techniques that we know refer to incorrect models because they actually yield the correct answer.
For instance
In circuit theory maxwells mesh currents.
In magnetic and other theory virtual work.
In magnetics and electrostatics the method of virtual images.

The last one is really the only one that has relevance to this thread.

Oh yes it is amazing what we get away with in various fields.  God must be looking down at us and saying, "Geeze, ha ha ha".

[Grandchuck]

A single, intuitive picture that captures light's behavior does not exist. Waves:particles:dualities might help a bit or confuse things more.

[paulca]

I had a bunch of interpretations of QM, double slit experiment I was happy with....

Right up until this video:


This holes my interpretations below the water line.  You see I was reasoning that as the photon is massless and thus travels at the speed of light, electrons their "nearly" as fast cousins.   When they are travelling, time and distance are compressed such that they exist as their source, all points along their vector of travel and at it's absorpton point, all at the same time.  So in that model, of course it knows how many slits there are of if there is a detector.... it has already got to where it's going before it's even left.

Then that video showed light actually travelling in non-quantum and non-simultaneous term.   If you attempt to invoke the photon's perspective you will get shot down rapidly.  Photon's don't have perspectives, apparently, they cannot be considered an "Observer"  or so physicists tell me.

[m k]

By the definition an observer needs time.

other thing,
event horizon is an edge of a black hole where geometry changes so that all directions are inwards.
What happens when black hole is so big that gravity around a center is enough to pull energy density so low that it becomes transparent.

[studiot]

I had a bunch of interpretations of QM, double slit experiment I was happy with....

Right up until this video:


This holes my interpretations below the water line.  You see I was reasoning that as the photon is massless and thus travels at the speed of light, electrons their "nearly" as fast cousins.   When they are travelling, time and distance are compressed such that they exist as their source, all points along their vector of travel and at it's absorpton point, all at the same time.  So in that model, of course it knows how many slits there are of if there is a detector.... it has already got to where it's going before it's even left.

Then that video showed light actually travelling in non-quantum and non-simultaneous term.   If you attempt to invoke the photon's perspective you will get shot down rapidly.  Photon's don't have perspectives, apparently, they cannot be considered an "Observer"  or so physicists tell me.

Thank you for this.
I note that the video was very short on actual 'footage' of the photons.
Also that the laser light was pulsed (we are normally talking about pulsed sources without mentioning it)
I also mentioned a spinning laser back along.