/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6919630
>just keep reflecting and refracting all over the place for all of time

No, not in way you are trying to talk about it. Your "scope" is zoomed out. "reflected" and "refracted" are ultimately emergent statical properties. You need to zoom in to the actual "particle interaction" level. Aka Quantum field theory. These are written out in diagrams called "Feynman diagram".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram

So, "fundamentally, how does a photon interact with the other particles?"

Well, photon interactions contain 3 particles (including the photon); Photon, Particle A, and Particle B. Also, A and B cannot be a photon. Note: There are many other constraints on A and B, but we can ignore those for now. So with basic combinatorics we get all possible interactions classes:

1) Photon + A - > B
2) Photon + B - > A
3) Photon -> A + B
4) A + B - > Photon
5) A -> B + Photon
6) B -> A + Photon

So you can see a photon is not "immortal" in the sense you mean, because there is never an interaction with a photon on both ends. If there was, "perhaps" we could try to say it is the "same" photon on either end. However, we can't even make it to that case.

So, how the fuck does the photon traveling look?: Photon1 -> A1 + B1 -> Photon2

And reflection/refraction: Photon1 + B1 -> A2 -> B3 + Photon3

Those are the "fundamental" things the photon is doing. However, this matter is complicated even further, since we are dealing with quantum particles. Meaning the photon doesn't just take one "path". It takes the averages of all possible allowed paths over all possible space-time simultaneously. From there we get statical values, which directly correspond to our observations and these properties you call "refraction" and "reflection".