Quotes About Photons

Spookier still, Bell's theorem has now been proven time after time after time. It took a few years to create lab equipment sensitive enough and accurate enough to make the necessary measurements, and they ultimately used photons rather than electrons for the experiments, but since the 1970s physicists have repeatedly confirmed the theory's predictions in the laboratory. Einstein and company was wrong; the Copenhagen gang was right. We create reality.

it takes photons of light just over 8 minutes to reach Earth, 150 million kilometers away.

I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.

But the energy of the electrons knocked free of the metal does not depend, as common sense would suggest, on the brightness of the light. It depends instead on the color of the light—on its frequency.

If the spirit of a place has anything to do with what a poet makes, then it must be the intensity of light (two f-stops brighter than New York) and the extreme geography that so infuse the mind in Provincetown and make one more reflective. With all that jazzed-up light, the excitement of photons bounding off water and sand, even the ordinary air says, Notice me. … the function of art is to wake us up to the very life we are living.

Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.

Light is not a smooth continuous stream. It is made up of a lot of quanta , little packettes of energy, so that the flow of light is lumpy. These quanta, or particles, of light are called photons. Practically everything comes in quantum of some size. This gives quantum physics its name, you know.

Visible photons now, the ones that make up the light that people use to see by, they have a higher frequency and more energy. One of those can have quite a noticeable effect. The really affluent ones though, the big spenders, are the X-ray and gamma photons. Each one of those carries a lot of energy around with it and they can really make their presence felt on their surroundings if they choose to interact.

Even if the asymmetry were 1 part in a billion there would be enough matter left over to account for everything we see in the universe today. In fact, an asymmetry of 1 part in a billion or so is precisely what was called for, because today there are roughly 1 billion photons in the cosmic microwave background for every proton in the universe. The CMBR photons are the remnants, in this picture, of the early matter-antimatter annihilations near the beginning of time.

light is an electromagnetic wave.

Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.

diagonally polarized photons are in a quantum quandary when confronted by a vertical Polaroid filter.

bosons—photons, and so on— are in some respects strongly tied to spacetime. Their wavelengths expand as the universe expands.

Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call

signal of particles beyond the Standard Model, helping the Higgs decay into two photons.

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.

a daily reminder of nature's abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or—more familiarly to most of us—as part of the static on TV pictures.

Somehow, though, the photons always get it right. Whenever the detector is on—again, even if the choice to turn it on is delayed until long after a given photon has passed through the beam splitter—the photon acts fully like a particle.

it's as though the photons have a "premonition" of the experimental situation they will encounter farther downstream, and act accordingly. It's as if a consistent and definite history becomes manifest only after the future to which it leads has been fully settled.4

You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.

Roughly 12 billion years ago, a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum arose in the nothingness and expanded at a rate beyond human comprehension, doubling every 10–34 seconds.1 As it whooshed from insignificance to enormity it cooled, allowing quarks, neutrinos, photons, electrons, then the quark triumvirates known as protons and neutrons to precipitate from its energy.

Electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons are the components of everything that sways in the space around us. They are the "elementary particles" studied in particle physics.

A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr's quantum leaps, against Heisenberg's world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.