Warp wrote:
> somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
>> You are thinking electromagnetic waves, which are transverse.
> 
>   A photon will travel rectilinearly, not in a sine wave pattern.

But the math that describes the photon's interaction with nearby photons and 
electrons is based on multiplication (and addition) of complex vectors, 
which means it behaves as if there are conic-section waves involved, 
sometimes. Bascially, any given photon goes straight (until it interacts 
with something, at least), but a collection of photons will statistically 
have some properties in common with waves because of complex 
probabilities[1] involved in the interactions, which is why you get 
diffraction and such.


[1] As in, probabilities in which the probability of an event happening is a 
complex number (more specifically, a complex vector whose length is <= 1), 
and the probability of two events happening is the product of the complex 
numbers, etc.  I found it interesting that someone proved that only 
1-dimensional and 2-dimensional probabilities are consistent, and you can't 
build the same sort of system with (say) 3D vectors.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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