[dbetteridge]

Follow up question from someone who's mostly forgotten his university physics.

Do photons actually exist, in the traditional sense of physical matter.

Or are they just a convenient short hand to describe the transfer of energy via waves in the fabric or space time, if they dont experience the universe when passing through it but only when interacting with matter and matters "dents" in space-time.

[svachalek]

As a non-physicist, my understanding is that they actually exist, but can't be thought of as flying around like ping pong balls. I think it's one of those things that comes down to interpretation though, where the math is very clear but how you think of what it "means" lies beyond science.

[dbetteridge]

Went on a slight rabbit hole reading after posting this and seems like we're all just excitations in a stack of quantum fields :-D