It’s not a horrible write-up but it doesn’t do much to simplify things. If I had to explain these concepts as close to an ELI5 as I could, I would use less words.
Photons have characteristics of both a wave and a particle. In many ways, it’s easier to think of a photon as an interaction point. As a wave propagates, any collision point could be thought of as a photon. You shake some electrons in one antenna, they create a wave through the air, the wave propagates until it hits another antenna and the photons are where that wave starts to shake another bunch of electrons.
I am not quite sure what they were trying to explain about waveform collapse, TBH. There is just a probability curve about where a photon will “exist” at a specific time. You can’t predict the location of a photon, but you can observe it. There isn’t really a physical “collapse” of anything. The probability curve “collapses” into a single point once observed. There is no probability once something is observed. It’s there or it isn’t, so the math function has “collapsed”: There isn’t a need to calculate probability at that time.
This is far from perfect, but it’s probably easier to digest. I don’t even want to know how much physics I broke with my descriptions, but I do know it’s easier to visualize.
It’s not a horrible write-up but it doesn’t do much to simplify things. If I had to explain these concepts as close to an ELI5 as I could, I would use less words.
Photons have characteristics of both a wave and a particle. In many ways, it’s easier to think of a photon as an interaction point. As a wave propagates, any collision point could be thought of as a photon. You shake some electrons in one antenna, they create a wave through the air, the wave propagates until it hits another antenna and the photons are where that wave starts to shake another bunch of electrons.
I am not quite sure what they were trying to explain about waveform collapse, TBH. There is just a probability curve about where a photon will “exist” at a specific time. You can’t predict the location of a photon, but you can observe it. There isn’t really a physical “collapse” of anything. The probability curve “collapses” into a single point once observed. There is no probability once something is observed. It’s there or it isn’t, so the math function has “collapsed”: There isn’t a need to calculate probability at that time.
This is far from perfect, but it’s probably easier to digest. I don’t even want to know how much physics I broke with my descriptions, but I do know it’s easier to visualize.