Question

are photons made of subatomic particles?

Answer 1

The idea of a particle underwent serious rethinking in light of experiments which showed that light could behave like a stream of particles (called photons) as well as exhibit wave-like properties. These results necessitated the new concept of wave-particle duality to reflect that quantum-scale "particles" are understood to behave in a way resembling both particles and waves. Another new concept, the uncertainty principle, concluded that analyzing particles at these scales would require a statistical approach. In more recent times, wave-particle duality has been shown to apply not only to photons, but to increasingly massive particles

Answer 2

No, a photon is an elementary particle and thus, has no substructure.

Subatomic particles include elementary particles (such as quarks and leptons) and composite particles (such as hadrons, a group of particles including mesons and baryons).

Answer 3

okay, so I've heard of photons being described as "packets" of light. could you elaborate on this concept?

Answer 4

A photon is the basic unit of light. In scientific terms, it is a single quantum of light. And a quantum is considered to be a discrete packet of energy.

This is better explained by the Planck hypothesis, which states that the energy of a photon is equal to the product of the photon's frequency and the Planck's constant.

Perhaps this might help: (scroll down to Photons: The Quanta of Light).

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mod2.html

Answer 5

neat! so is there as set limit to how much energy a photon can have?

Answer 6

Is there a minimum!? you'd think if the energy was too low it wouldn't be considered a photon at all.

Answer 7

Read the link carefully.

"But the frequency available is continuous and has no upper or lower bound, so there is no finite lower limit or upper limit on the possible energy of a photon. On the upper side, there are practical limits because you have limited mechanisms for creating really high energy photons. Low energy photons abound, but when you get below radio frequencies, the photon energies are so tiny compared to room temperature thermal energy that you really never see them as distinct quantized entities - they are swamped in the background. Another way to say it is that in the low frequency limits, things just blend in with the classical treatment of things and a quantum treatment is not necessary." - this is exactly from the link I gave you.

Answer 8

fascinating! I've read articles about ALL space. the article claimed that there isnt a single point in space that doesn't have some sort of residual light energy within it; possibly suggesting that in some way all things in this universe are made from light. no idea if this is true or not but i found it pretty damn interesting.

Answer 9

Yes,