Mandel
drorzel | August 5, 2010A reader emailed me with a few questions regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, one of which is too good not to turn into a blog post:
What is a photon from an experimental perspective?... Could you perhaps provide me with a reference that discusses some experiments and these definitional issues?
The short form of the experimental answer is "A photon is the smallest amount of light that will cause a detector to 'click.'" (For some reason, hypothetical light detector technology has never really advanced past the Geiger counter stage-- even though it's all electrical pulses these days, we…