The information contained in light

[Syne]

Light waves often do constructively and destructively interact, but on average these are cancelled out. This is because the wave peaks and troughs are generally incoherent and out of phase.
When rest mass is zero, energy is still proportional to momentum and frequency. It's basically the energy of the motion.
Refraction is an interaction with the medium's electrons. This is how you get magnification in a lens, but it doesn't generally happen as light moves.

Nothing is carrying a complete image. Each photon/wave is carrying one frequency.

The waves propagating thru the EM field carry the images, which we see with our eyes as a live action movie of what is happening around us. This movie, which is actually two movies, one for each offset eye creating the illusion of 3D, is all we ever see of the world. Just morphing light images seamlessly streamed to us from all directions at once.

Waves, plural, sure. But each individual wave only carries it's own frequency. There is no image encoded in an individual wave.

[Magical Realist]

I am more inclined to view the many light waves traveling from all directions in space at any given time as more a field than a traffic concourse of moving and interpenetrating "things". The nature of every point of it providing a unique perspective on a surrounding 3D panorama of projecting light suggests something more like an aether to me, although that has long since been discarded by modern science. The speed at which this whole "luminosphere", as I call it, is constantly being assembled and updated every nanosecond makes it practically substantial to us at our scale or at least a smooth diaphanous and kaleidoscopic emmanation of the physical world presumably going on behind it all. An ethereal field, almost a hologram, of light energy dense with instantly accessible information and a completely "built-in" self-navigability. More like being in a video game I guess, at least in purely visual terms.

[Syne]

Well, sure, you can just ignore the science. 9_9

[confused2]

I was just a humble electrical engineer so FWIW..

A photon can be thought of as a quantized field. meaning.. like a gas .. the photon is in there somewhere .. all that can be known is the probability of detecting the photon at any point .. which can be calculated and may (usually) be so close to zero that it can be ignored .. the most likely path looks like a straight line from the source but only because all other paths tend to sum to 'very unlikely verging on impossible'. If/when a photon is detected the probability of detecting it anywhere else becomes zero - instantly. To clear the field 'instantly' requires an action that is faster than light .. this is what makes quantum mechanics incompatible with Einstein's relativity where the speed of light is finite.

The double slit experiment reveals the true nature of photons and gives rise to a number of interpretations of how such weirdness could even happen in a sane universe .. there may be a fault with reality.

[Magical Realist]

I like that photons are basically seen as fields instead of as discrete particles. A whole cluster of them would seem therefore to amount to an enormous field. Fields suggest interpenetrability, uniformity, distribution, and the point-by-point storage of information.

"In science, specifically physics, a field is a physical quantity assigned to every point in space and time, representing a force or value that varies throughout a region. Fields can be scalar (single number, like temperature) or vector (magnitude and direction, like wind or gravity), providing a way to model how forces act across space."

The problem though is that this "luminosphere" as I call it, essentially the electromagnetic continuum except just for visible light, has no mass. So the objections of physicists to the 1800's notion of the luminiferous aether, based on experiments with light proving that there is no mass in it, would be as expected. The aether in this case posited NOT as the pre-existent medium of light waves but rather the sum total of all the light waves moving thru space. Just like molecules form a liquid and indeed solid matter at much larger scales, light emerges at our scale as a continuous and homogeneous field of visually accessible information.

[confused2]

If your intuition is that there's a lot more going on under the bonnet than is included in basic optics - I'd agree. All 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics are controversial .. I've given my own best (simplified) interpretation of an interpretation that was controversial to start with.
Years ago I wrote some 3d graphics software using Opengl .. basically ray tracing with the frill that one partially reflecting object can reflect light onto another .. the software sums the result to give a fairly photo-realistic result. Here's the crunch .. a photon only interferes with itself.. it knows nothing of any other photons .. when partially reflected it doesn't go one way or the other .. it goes both ways. Unlike the software that sums the result of reflections .. the photon does it by being most likely to appear from the brightest spot and less likely from a darker one .. how bright or dark a thing is is the number of photons received from it.

[Magical Realist]

I did a little research on the self-interference of the single photon and quickly realized it is way beyond my pay grade! I have to admit that all my understanding here of these phenomena are language and metaphor-based, not mathematically-based. IOW, a philosopher's view but not a physicist's or engineer's view. But I do enjoy the challenge of pushing scientific models to their rational limits until they break. Physicists are probably wise to this themselves, which is also probably why they rely more on the math than on the language.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questi...ith-itself

[confused2]

The self-interference of the single photon is a fun thing. Let's go with my 'quantized field' for a moment. Photons are not the same .. Larry the photon goes into his own private quantized field and stays there until Larry the photon comes out. Electrons are all absolutely identical .. put 10 electrons into a quantized field and there's no meaning to whether the one you got out is one you just put in or one you put in three weeks ago .. different maths and different effects. So everything you see is a single photon effect .. eyes and everything else are effectively photon counters.. an image is just how many photons and where they drop out of the field. In 1987 some smartass managed to make identical photons with his expensive wizzo lasers and got some of the effects you get with electrons .. so now any smartass can say 'photons CAN interfere with each other' without mentioning the lengths you have to go to to make it happen.

[confused2]

Holograms tell us a bit more about photons..also that I'm not just making this up as I go..

Normal (Classical) Holography (Single-Photon):
In standard holography, a laser is split, reflected off an object, and recombined with a reference beam* on a recording medium. Dirac’s principle generally applies: each photon interferes only with itself, meaning the overall interference pattern is built up by many single photons, not two photons interacting.

Smartass or Quantum Holography (Two-Photon Interference):
Researchers have developed "quantum holography" that uses entangled photon pairs (e.g., from spontaneous parametric down-conversion). This technique uses one photon to probe an object while its entangled twin (which never touches the object) acts as a reference, creating a "hologram of a single photon" through two-photon probability amplitude interference.
Distinction: Classical holograms are formed by the intensity pattern of many single-photon interference events. True two-photon, or quantum, holography involves the correlation between a pair of entangled photons.

Interestingly Larry the photon and all his friends will have each 'explored' the whole scene to build up the interference pattern .. otherwise it wouldn't work.

*Edit The reference beam comes from a beam splitter .. there's only one laser making the single photons that illuminate the object via two different paths.

Edit2.. MR's intuition that there's more to light than meets the eye is looking increasingly accurate.