Re: Is photon a wave packet ?

[Larry Woolf <larry.woolf@GAT.COM>]

The best answer is to get Feynman's QED and read chapter 2, Photons:
Particles of Light.

"people still tried to understand them in terms of old fashioned ideas (such
as, light goes in straight lines).  But at a certain point the old fashioned
ideas would be begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in
effect, "Your old fashioned ideas are no damn good when ..." If you get rid
of all the old fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I'm explaining
in these lectures - adding arrows for all the ways an event can happen..."

"We draw an arrow for each way an event can happen and add the arrows.  The
square of the resulting final arrow represents the probability of the
event."

Larry Woolf; General Atomics; 3550 General Atomics Court, San Diego, CA
92121; Phone:858-526-8575; FAX:858-526-8568; http://www.sci-ed-ga.org

-----Original Message-----
From:  William Beaty
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2002 9:55 AM
Subject: Re: Is photon a wave packet ?

On Thu, 16 May 2002, Michael Edmiston wrote:

> Some of the light is headed across "empty space" to a detector located 10
> light seconds from the source.  When approximately 5 seconds have elapsed,
> describe the space between the source and detector... what's there...
> anything describable?

Do the same thing, but with a 10MHz frequency.  EM is EM, after all.

While on the fly, are radio waves not describable?  Or do you mean that,
as the wavelength becomes shorter and the quantized energy larger, they
become more quantum-y and less describable?