The Photon Did It

Uncertain Principles: What’s a Photon, and How Do We Know they Exist?

Even if the energy of a single photon is significantly greater than the energy required to trigger a “click” in your detector, for a given frequency of light, you will only ever find the energy arriving in single-photon amounts.

How do we know this is the case? There are three great historical experiments that mark the key steps on the way to full acceptance of the photon model: the photoelectric effect, the Compton effect, and photon anti-bunching.

Oops. Spoiler alert. Sorry.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Simpsons Pop-Culture Potentate Reference

… if there was one. Until then, we still have the ant overlords.

Invasion

You think it’d be impossible to share your house with your wife, your daughter, and fifty million or so Argentine ants. And you would be correct.

There are billions of humans on earth, and trillions upon trillions of ants — an estimated 1.6 million for every human being. If the earth were a scale, and all the humans were placed on one side and all the ants on the other, it would not budge. Ants have answered the ever-expanding human biomass with an ever-expanding biomass of their own, so that the planet is poised, teetering between its two most successful civilizations — each of which is social, aggressive, expansionist, and well suited for war.