Does a single photon moving through space in an overall straight line actually trace out a sine wave, turning left and right as it goes?
In: Physics
Here’s my best attempt at explaining Quantum Field Theory to a five-year-old:
Think of a large pool filled with water. If the water is very still, you can barely see it’s there. However, when the water is disturbed (or “excited” in the case of a field), you can observe the ripples as they move through the water.
If you create a very large disturbance in the water and the ripples splash against something, it can create individual droplets that appear visually separate from the rest of the water.
Now imagine that droplets are more or less likely to be created at certain points in the ripple (I.E. closer to the centre of the ripple, or at the peaks rather than troughs).
The droplets aren’t guaranteed to appear at any point, but the *probability* of them appearing at certain locations is higher than others.
The ripple represents the “wave” portion of light. The sine wave that we represent light as is a *wave function*. Like the ripples in the earlier example, a photon (our metaphorical droplet) is more likely to be found at certain points in the probability wave (ripple).
Just like the droplets only appearing when the ripple splashes against something, photons only exist at the moment that they are observed. Imagine this as a ripple in the photon field, where photons only pop in to existence when the wave “splashes” against something (like other particles).
Hope I did okay!
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