When Light Speaks

Gracia, Jose

It was time to make Quantum Mechanics real. Once we do, the theory stops whispering and starts speaking plainly. This chapter shows what happens when we take that step. By treating clocks, their quadratures, and their comparison channels as physically real rather than abstract mathematical decorations, the entire relativistic structure reorganizes itself. Proper time emerges from ticking, the light cone from null comparison, geometry from transport, and spacetime itself becomes a bookkeeping device rather than a substance. What follows is not a reinterpretation of old equations, but a reversal of what we take as fundamental—and once the foundations shift, the physics becomes startlingly clear.

Theodor W. Hänsch

H. J. Carmichael

We review studies of the fluctuations of light made accessible by the invention of the laser and the strong interactions realized in cavity QED experiments. Photon antibunching advocating the discrete (particles), is contrasted with amplitude squeezing which speaks of the continuous (waves). The tension between particles and waves is demonstrated by a recent experiment which combines the measurement strategies used to observe these nonclassical behaviors of light [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3149 (2000)].

Harold T. Davis

Djamel Abdelmoula

This work is a part of unpublished ideas about fundamental physics and there evolution over time. In this paper, I started by speaking about light and its nature as the cornerstone of physics. Then we describe the evolution of ideas about light and interpretations of its nature in terms of waves and particles; A duality which lead us to suggest a new nature of light at a halfway between these two interpretations. We reinvented the photon that we renamed photillon. However, it remains to test this new approach in the interpretation of light-related phenomena. An attempt to interpret Young's interference fringes is made on the basis of this new conception of light and a new interpretation of the Planck constant has emerged naturally from this new nature.

J. J. Thomson