Friday, October 22, 2004  

Prof. Matt Anderson

Dept of Physics, SDSU

"Those Wacky Photons"

2:00 pm in room P-148

Abstract: 

Some of the greatest physicists have struggled with the concept of  the photon. Exactly what is a photon? Where is it? And how does it behave? Photons are everywhere, of course. In fact, that is how you are able to read this abstract right now, because photons have traveled from the text to your eye (or specifically, photons have traveled from the white spaces in between the black text to your eye). We deal with photons every day on a macroscopic scale, but how do they measure up on the microscopic scale? When dealing with individual photons, it turns out they often violate common sense. In this talk I will shine light on the history of the photon and the weird quantum world in which it lives.