• Photons, the fundamental particles of the electromagnetic field that permeates the universe, don’t have mass. • They don’t have charge. • Because they travel at the cosmic speed limit, they don’t experience time. • They sound completely alien. • And yet photons are the quanta of light that allow us to observe the world around us-both up close and from afar. • “Photons, in one way or another, have always been a key element in the way we can look at nature and understand it and manipulate it.” “Photons, in one way or another, have always been a key element in the way we can look at nature and understand it and manipulate it,” says Claudio Pellegrini,distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and adjunct professor at the Department of Energy’sSLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Article Summaries:
- Photons, massless quanta of the electromagnetic field, have long been central to our understanding of light. Historically, scientists debated whether light was a particle or a wave, with early ideas from Galileo, Newton, and the ether hypothesis giving way to Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. The 20th‑century breakthrough of wave‑particle duality-established by Planck, Einstein, Compton, and de Broglie-reconciled these views. Today, this dual nature underpins photonic technologies such as lasers, microscopes, and quantum computers, illustrating how foundational research on photons continues to drive scientific and technological progress.
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