Are magnet photons the same as light photons?

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I will try my best to explain this question because I’ve googled multiple times over a decade and have asked a physics PhD and neither could understand what I meant, nor answered the question.

I understand that Photons are wave-particles. The smaller the wavelength, the more frequency. I also know that electromagnetism are 2 of the “same thing”, using the same force particle, a photon.

So what frequency do photons that are a acting as strictly magnetic? Magnetism seems to penetrate a heck of a lot more things than even gamma rays (excluding some metals), so why’s that? What makes them different, if they’re the same particle? Are magnetism photons “straight” or act more as a particle than a wave? Do magnetic photons experience the Doppler Effect? If we can count light photons with special instruments, can we do the same with magnet photons? What causes magnetic photons to “bend” around a magnetic object? Like if there was an MRI machine, does that mean there are just a LOT more magnetic photons or is the amplitude of them greater? Can magnetic photons turn into light photons directly?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I think part of your misunderstanding has to do with a layfolk misconception of wave-particle duality. A lot of people take it to mean you can choose whichever you want, and then they naturally choose to think of light as made up of tiny balls of light called photons because that jives with hunter gatherer on the plains of Africa scale things. These photons being in multiple places at once to interact with themselves and other weird shit is then just tossed into the weird QM realm.

The actual case is the opposite. Light is absolutely not particles travelling through space and absolutely is waves propagating through the EM field. It’s only when these waves interact with stuff that we are forced to consider photons to fit EMR with our particle models.

Now we’re often mostly interested in interactions so you definitely do see photons used a lot in the standard model or whatever. In a sense though it doesn’t really make sense to even consider photons as a thing outside of the moment of interaction. “This interaction emits a photon which we immediately start considering as a wave in the EM field.”

If you can wrap your head around that then I think it becomes pretty obvious that a magnetic photon is also not a thing.

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