this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Science Memes

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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Photons are the smallest unit of energy that can be transferred between a light wave and a different particle.

That is a much better description than what I have heard for the last 30 years: "A photon is a packet of energy". That made no sense to me back then, and makes no sense to me now and, IMHO, doesn't quite give a good visualization. It's a placeholder, and I suppose it is slightly accurate depending on how "packet" is defined.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

That's awesome, and I totally agree. Everyone already intuitively knows that waves carry energy. We've all heard of tsunamis and earthquakes. The only difference on the quantum scale is that the amount of energy transferred is discretized.