(Searched and although this has been asked before I still can’t find an answer that makes much sense to me)
So how does a photon come into existence, and how can it instantly be travelling at C? I turn on a light bulb and photons are instantly created and travelling at C…but created from what, exactly? The light bulb filament is in a vacuum, but every time I turn on the light bulb new photons are simply created out of nothing (with no “fuel” to draw from)?
I guess I’m struggling to understand how heating the filament results in billions (?) of photons in a constant stream travelling at C, when a millisecond earlier there was just an inert metal thread in a vacuum.
In: Physics
You seem to tripping over a concept of vacuum as “nothing.”
Modern physics has fields present at every point in space, even in a true vacuum. One of the fields in question is the electromagnetic field. A photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field, basically a wave/ripple in the field.
Another misunderstanding in your comment is that “there’s no fuel.” This isn’t combustion. Rather than fuel, there is energy. Energy can change forms. In this case from electrical energy to light (photons). Electrical energy is dumped into atoms of the filament causing excitation of the electrons. Electrons dropping from their excited level release quantized energy “packets” which we perceive/understand as photons.
If that’s insufficient and you still get hung up on the mechanics of the specific transitions mentioned above you’re going to have to ask a particle physicist, or really dig into quantum physics, but I guarantee that will leave you with more questions rather than less. I’ve yet to meet anyone who had less questions after a dive into quantum physics.
Oh, and your “billions (?)” is many orders of magnitude too low unless you’re talking about an extremely short time period.
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