[ELI5] How do photons mediates the electromagnetic force?
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Think of a photon as an event.
Lets look at an example: we know that light is an electromagnetic wave but light can knock an electron. So when light propagates through a vacuum we can describe it as a wave. But when it interacts with something like an electron it can be treated as a particle with momenta and use principles like conservation of momentum and conservation of energy.
So the interaction that light makes is a photon. You can describe the interaction with a particle.
This is the key idea behind virtual particles. You have an interaction, in theory the interaction happens through some field but you can model it like a particle with some momenta, mass, spin getting transmitted.
So lets say we have an electron and a proton making a hydrogen atom. Can we model the electromagnetic interaction between them as photos bouncing between them? Yes. Is that whats going on? No. Just think about it how would the proton “know” where to “shoot” that photon to “hit” the electron. We know that the potential is spherically symmetric around a proton and an electron. They are interacting through the EM field. Where the electron (lets say) happens to be, thats where the photon happens.
How do photos transmit the EM force? Well we are on backwards here. We call an EM interaction a photon.
Whats actually going on is a bit of a mystery.
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