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# Talk:Quanta

It is not convenient to try to understand quantized energy, since we have no direct physical conception of it (no direct sense experience of energy). It would be more useful to reduce the quantization of energy to quantization of length, or time, or both.

This means that we should use the Planck–Einstein relation E=hν and deduce from it an equivalent expression that gives us a quantization of length or time.

See also Wikipedia Photon article, and especially the section on Wave–particle duality and uncertainty principles, where it discusses what we know now about the properties of the photon:

Photons, like all quantum objects, exhibit wave-like and particle-like properties. Their dual wave–particle nature can be difficult to visualize. The photon displays clearly wave-like phenomena such as diffraction and interference on the length scale of its wavelength. For example, a single photon passing through a double-slit experiment exhibits interference phenomena but only if no measure was made at the slit. A single photon passing through a double-slit experiment lands on the screen with a probability distribution given by its interference pattern determined by Maxwell's equations.[52] However, experiments confirm that the photon is not a short pulse of electromagnetic radiation; it does not spread out as it propagates, nor does it divide when it encounters a beam splitter.[53] Rather, the photon seems to be a point-like particle since it is absorbed or emitted as a whole by arbitrarily small systems, systems much smaller than its wavelength, such as an atomic nucleus (≈10−15 m across) or even the point-like electron. Nevertheless, the photon is not a point-like particle whose trajectory is shaped probabilistically by the electromagnetic field, as conceived by Einstein and others; that hypothesis was also refuted by the photon-correlation experiments cited above. According to our present understanding, the electromagnetic field itself is produced by photons, which in turn result from a local gauge symmetry and the laws of quantum field theory (see the Second quantization and Gauge boson sections below).