Edit: Sorry I don’t have an intelligent response to your actual point. For what it’s worth, I (as a physics dilettante) think that light is neither waves nor particles, but blobs of amplitude (or something). It certainly doesn’t behave like little billiard balls. I defer to Feynman, though.
I remembered it the wrong way around. Feynman (and the other 2) went for particles rather than waves. What I was trying to say is that similar to atomic therory moving from “a useful pedagogical device” (1860) to “atoms really exist” (today), photons went from “this curious thing that looks like a particle or a wave depending on how you set up your experiment” to “It is a particle”.
Well it went to “it’s a particle” because all the other particles became “excitations of quantum fields” as well...
(And there are still significant differences in the phenomenological treatments because the boundary conditions play a very special role in describing and quantizing the field modes in actual calculations.)
In the sense that the word “particle” at that scale now means “quantum probability distribution”. BLOB THINGS.
(I still visualise atoms as planetary electrons around a nucleus sun—the electrons possibly in shells—until I catch myself and try to visualise s and p shells. Too much out-of-date popular science as a child.)
Feynman called light particles. (See also this video at 36:15 through 36:30.)
And welcome to Less Wrong!
Edit: Sorry I don’t have an intelligent response to your actual point. For what it’s worth, I (as a physics dilettante) think that light is neither waves nor particles, but blobs of amplitude (or something). It certainly doesn’t behave like little billiard balls. I defer to Feynman, though.
I remembered it the wrong way around. Feynman (and the other 2) went for particles rather than waves. What I was trying to say is that similar to atomic therory moving from “a useful pedagogical device” (1860) to “atoms really exist” (today), photons went from “this curious thing that looks like a particle or a wave depending on how you set up your experiment” to “It is a particle”.
Well it went to “it’s a particle” because all the other particles became “excitations of quantum fields” as well...
(And there are still significant differences in the phenomenological treatments because the boundary conditions play a very special role in describing and quantizing the field modes in actual calculations.)
In the sense that the word “particle” at that scale now means “quantum probability distribution”. BLOB THINGS.
(I still visualise atoms as planetary electrons around a nucleus sun—the electrons possibly in shells—until I catch myself and try to visualise s and p shells. Too much out-of-date popular science as a child.)