Light

this is either a very simple question with an obvious answer or a rare question with an unanswerable solution.
light is particles,right. so when you turn off a light where do those light particles go? they obviously vanish, but where to? if their just dying then where do their remnants go?
im not sure if theres a scientific theory for this, im not sure anyone here could give a fair answer.

what do you think?

It’s really hard to say. Scientists disagree about if light is like rays or particles, because in some situations light acts like rays, and in others it acts like particles.

I bet the light rays all get absorbed very quickly. As you know, they reflect off of surfaces, giving us color and the ability to see. But most of that light probably gets absorbed, and after it reflects off something once, it probably gets absorbed the second time it hits something. So you need a constant stream of light to be able to see.

Yes, now I remember what I learnt in school. The light is asorbed into the materials it shines on, and turns into heat. But the heat is so little that we usually can’t sense it. Is that a good answer? :neutral:

In addition, it drifts away with ~300,000 km/s…

Yes. The reason you can’t see in a room without windows after you turn the light off is because the light is absorbed into all the materials. Specifically, all the electrons in the atoms that make up the materials absorb the photons of light and go to a higher enrgy state, sometimes just giving a little bit of light off again (potentially in the infrared spectrum, aka “heat” [not really heat, but for simplification]).

From what I know, the photon of light (a particle) has an electromagnetic field that fluctuates (over time, a wave), BUT it has no charge (yet it has an electromagnetic field) and no mass.

So when we are talking about light as a wave we normally are talking about it’s electromagnetic properties. When we talk about it as a particle, we are talking about just about every other property (velocity and direction, energy).