Our starting platform is the staggering and pervasive successes of the Huygens-Fresnel principle (HFP) from macro to nano photonics fields, which model the propagation as if each point on the wave front serves as a secondary point source. Summation of the complex amplitudes of these secondary wave fronts with proper inclination factor gives us remarkably accurate results for every possible realistic situation. Therefore, we take the concept of secondary point source of "energy" as a reality in all of cosmic space, irrespective of whether the space is "empty" or filled with "materials" as we understand them. It amounts to accepting the existence of an all pervading cosmic tension field (CTF). We justify our platform by comparing and contrasting with the various "material" based propagating waves that we can generate and experience, which always require the existence of uniform tension field energy at every point. Then we show that two of the key motivations behind Dirac's quantization of the EM field can easily be accommodated by semi-classical model a la Jaynes (quantized atoms and classical EM wave packet). They are: (i) Photo electric effects that require photon to be indivisible packets of energy; and (ii) QM transition rule requiring the emission of a unique frequency ν would violate "monochromaticity" rule implied by Fourier's time-frequency theorem and "coherence theory" if photons were to be time-finite classical wave packets.

Date Published: 31 August 2007
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6664, The Nature of Light: What Are Photons?, 666404 (31 August 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.740189

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6664:
The Nature of Light: What Are Photons?
Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri; Al F. Kracklauer; Katherine Creath, Editor(s)