Ron Parker <ron### [at] povrayorg> wrote:
: Understanding refraction (and diffraction, too) requires one to see the 
: energy as waves instead of as particles.  It's impossible to understand as 
: long as you keep thinking of them as strictly photons.

  In fact, I personally like to think about light as a(n electromagnetic) wave,
which just sometimes happens to act like a bunch of particles for some
weird duality phenomenon.
  I know that this "photon" idea has got so strong in almost 100 years that
many people only know about photons and nothing else. They don't even
understand what is a wave. Of course this is logical: It's easier for the
human mind to grasp the concept of a tiny particle "flying" in space than
an esoteric "wave" which exists and advances in the vacuum.
  I personally like to think that photons do not really exist, but they are
just a "mathematical help" to understand the behaviour of electromagnetic
waves. As many other things in quantum mechanics, there's a minimal amount
of eletromagnetic radiation which can exist, and every amount of
electromagnetic radiation is a direct multiple of this minimum amount. This
minimum amount is what we call "photon". Due to its properties it makes the
wave sometimes act like if it was made of particles.
  The wave itself is just an advancing phenomenon caused by changes in the
electromagnetic field. Of course I don't claim that I fully understand this.

-- 
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rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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