eli5 What is light made up of? Where does it come from inside a torch? Is light just un-containable luminous particles than can never be studied as a single unit inside a Microscope?
In: Physics
Light is made up of photons, which in turn are small packages of energy moving at light speed.
Light is created whenever small amounts of energy are released in subatomic processes. This usually happens when electrons around nuclei are infused with energy, then revert back to their “natural” state – they get rid of the excess energy by emitting a photon. This also happens during lightning strikes (infusing the air’s electrons with massive energy, then releasing it as light) and inside light bulbs (infusing a gas’ electrons with energy through electricity, which then releases the excess energy as photons).
You can’t study light particles in a microscope, not just because of their speed, but also because in order to see them you need them to be absorbed by your retina, i.e. destroying them. When you study a microbe in a microscope, you do that by bombarding it with photons (light), then capturing the light that gets bounced back from the microbe, concentrate a lot of that in the lenses and absorb it with your eyes’ retinas. From that absorbed light you then infer the qualities of the microbe. If you were studying photons, you would basically bombard photons with other photons, which would combine their energy and possibly emit different photons; Either way you’d actually see the result of the merger, not the original photons.
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