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Will Photon crash each other?


Light is composed of particles called photons, and matter is composed of particles called electrons, protons, neutrons. It's only when the mass of a particle gets small enough that its wavelike properties show up. To help understand all this let's look at how light behaves as a wave and as a particle.

There are two kinds of particles:

  1. Bosons, which follow Bose-Einstein statistics, and which can superimpose over each other. They don’t interact with themselves, and you can have an infinite number on the head of a pin. These are mostly the so-called force carriers, which include photons, W and Z bosons (weak force), gluons (strong force) and hypothetically also gravitons. The massless ones (photons, gravitons) have the longest range and travel at the speed of light. Photons are spin 1 (polarized) and gravitons are spin 2 (as gravity is a bidirectional or always attractive field).
  2. Fermions, pretty much everything else, are spin 1/2, and follow Fermi-Dirac statistics, and cannot (normally) occupy the same space, or indeed, not even the same energy state. This is called the Pauli exclusion principle, but the resistance is not infinite and can be collapsed by a black hole. Most Fermions are charged + or -. except for neutrinos.

Bosons which have identical quantum properties (e.g. wavelength) do not have separate identities. This affects the probability of finding them. Consider two photons in a box, and you plan to measure whether you find them in the left half, right half, or one each. The probabilities are as follows:

  • 1/3rd - both photons on the left
  • 1/3rd - both photons on the right
  • 1/3rd - one photon on the left and one on the right

You can think of this being because you cannot label the photons A and B. But in any case it is very mysterious.

Fermions can’t have identical quantum states, so you can label them, and thus there are the following possibilities which are equally probable:

  • 1/4th - A,B on left
  • 1/4th - A on left, B on right
  • 1/4th - B on left, A on right
  • 1/4th - A,B on right

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