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leios
Animate a wavelet with a minimal amount of photons
About the author
Ameture Physicist
Quick Summary
Animate a single photon in a universe with nothing else
Target medium
Hoping to create a video explaining animation with Web tools(html, css and js)
Additional context
(Any additional licensing information? If you do not say anything, this post will be considered CC-BY.)
what would you imagine the end result to look like?
I'm not a physicist but in order to "animate" or show a photon you would have to animate some of it's properties, because you can't really "see" a single photon in that sense. So what properties would you animate? The probability distribution of the location? And if yes (again I'm not a physicist) wouldn't all "quantum" properties of the photon just spread out evenly over time, because there is nothing else in that universe (so no wave function collapse would occur at all).
I imagine a photon moving through space as an electromagnetic wave. I just want to see the changes to these fields alternate as it's position is changed, not considering all the other matter.
I think the "quantum stuff" would just lead to a lot of uncertainty over time and the photon will "spread out" all it's properties. If you have an "empty" universe it wouldn't even be possible to picture a change in position because you wouldn't have anything relative to the photon to measure the position against. There would be no position or speed in a universe with a single photon.
Let me say it this way: if there would be any result, it would be senseless. Or more theoretical: Anything that can be represented by "a wave", that is, something that changes a property over time and space can underly a fourier transform and will show a spectrum. But showing a spectrum, that is, different frequencies, it can not be a single photon. And, if there are more photons with nearby frequencies, the energy of every single oscillation is h*f and the energy is just not available. So you will not see any practical result. And: the idea to have only one photon in the universe is not applicable as the universe is the set of all particles available. Outside the universe is nothing we can know, otherwise it's inside. And the universe of a single photon would have neither space no time.
Addentum: the concept of a photon to be something like a wavelet it not applicable. The misconception I see in the community today is, that something that is created from quanta must consist of quanta. If you take a look on the original Max Planck paper on blackbody radiation you may find: we see the electromagnetic field as a field of quanta that all form an energy spectrum where there is a smallest amount of energy and all other quanta are multiples of this amount and the distribution of the energy to these energy levels firstly is according to the conservation of energy and secondly follows statics. Then he explicitly tells: We take a lowest energy and calculate the distribution (black body radiation) But it we take a slightly different energy (e.g. a value between the lowest energy and the first harmonic, we will have a set of different energies, but still the same spectrum!
That is: there is no need for a field quantizised, probing the field creates the quanta.
Later Bose/Einstein showed, that Planck theoretical oscillators in the walls of the heated black body is nothing but the volume itself that is a resonator for the electromagnetic field.
If you like to continue with this topic I can give you a hint on how to see photons that are not wavelets but the same moment create waves ;-) But you see: a single photon can not do this task. so you have to change the subject to: animate a wavelet with a minimal amount of photons ;-)