Our changing views of photons: a tutorial memoir

Advances in technology often rely on a world of photons as the basic units of light. Increasingly one reads of photons as essential to enterprises in Photonics and Quantum Technology, with career and investment opportunities. Notions of photons have evolved from the energy-packet crowds of Planck and Einstein, the later field modes of Dirac, the seeming conflict of wave and particle photons, to the ubiquitous laser photons of today. Readers who take interest in contemporary technology will benefit from learning what photons are now considered to be, and how our views of photons have changed - in learning about the various operational definitions that have been used for photons and their association with a variety of quantum-state manipulations that include Quantum Information, astronomical sources and crowds of photons, the boxed fields of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics and single photons on demand, the photons of Feynman and Glauber, and the photon constituents of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.0?Our Changing Views of Photons: A Tutorial Memoir? presents those general topics as a memoir of the author's involvement with physics and the photons of theoretical Quantum Optics, written conversationally for readers with no assumed prior exposure to science. For readers who want a more detailed understanding of the theory, three substantial appendices provide tutorials.

Preface -- The cartoons -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Overview of the Memoir narrative -- 1.2 Preliminaries: Defining terms -- 1.3 Models of physical phenomena -- 1.4 Caveats -- 2 Basic background: Everyday physics and its math -- 2.1 Some mathematics -- 2.1.1 Mathematics of events and actions -- 2.1.2 Mathematics of numbers and equations -- 2.2 Particles: Elementary and structured -- 2.2.1 Indivisibility -- 2.2.2 Atoms -- 2.2.3 Electrons -- 2.2.4 Nuclei and their constituents -- 2.2.5 Antimatter -- 2.2.6 Particle sizes -- 2.2.7 Radiations -- 2.2.8 Particle spin: Fermions and bosons -- 2.3 Aggregates: Fluids, flows, waves and granules -- 2.3.1 Fluids and flows -- 2.3.2 Matter waves -- 2.3.3 Electromagnetic waves -- 2.3.4 Wave character -- 2.3.5 Granular character -- 2.4 Free space: The Vacuum -- 2.5 Forces and vectors -- 2.5.1 Force -- 2.5.2 Vectors -- 2.5.3 Forces from fields -- 2.6 Energy and heat -- 2.7 Equations of change: Particles and fluids -- 2.7.1 Particles: Newtonian mechanics -- 2.7.2 Wave equations -- 2.7.3 Wave attributes -- 2.8 Light: Electromagnetic radiation -- 2.8.1 Coherence -- 2.8.2 Incoherent sources -- 2.8.3 Coherent sources -- 2.8.4 Visualizing chaotic…