Ask A Genius 1347: Misconceptions in Quantum Mechanics and the True Nature of Photons
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/04/09
Rick Rosner: So, I took out my old quantum mechanics textbook—which, honestly, I never got all the way through. I made it partway, I guess. I don’t even remember if I passed the course that used this book. But I’ve been thinking—there’s still a ton I don’t know about quantum mechanics. And, as you know, people who don’t study it seriously—who just hear bits of it in magazine articles or online videos—tend to carry a lot of misconceptions.
Even people working in physics might have blind spots, especially outside their immediate specialties. Quantum mechanics isn’t intuitive. It’s a highly mathematical framework designed to describe systems where we can’t know everything at once—where outcomes are probabilistic, and measurements influence what we observe. So yeah, in some sense, it’s the mathematics of incomplete information. But it’s not wishy-washy; it’s precise and predictive within its domain.
One thing that came up right away when I opened the textbook again was photons. The book talked about how photons come in discrete packets of energy—which is true, but it’s easy to misinterpret. Each photon carries energy that’s proportional to its frequency, using the formula E=hνE=hν. Planck’s constant h is tiny, so the energy per photon depends heavily on the frequency: infrared photons have less energy, ultraviolet ones have more. It’s a continuous relationship.
But here’s where people get it wrong: they think that photons themselves come only in a set of fixed energy levels—like they’re somehow prepackaged into energy multiples. That’s not how it works. Photons can have any energy value, in principle, as long as it corresponds to a physically realizable frequency. They don’t come in fixed rungs on a universal energy ladder. The process that creates a photon—like an electron dropping from one energy level to another in an atom—that is where the discreteness comes from.
So yes, in hydrogen, for example, electrons can only occupy certain allowed energy levels. When an electron drops from a higher level to a lower one, it emits a photon whose energy equals the difference between those two levels. That’s where you get discrete lines in the hydrogen spectrum. But photons in general—say, from thermal radiation, lasers, or synchrotrons—aren’t limited to those atomic values. They’re just packets of electromagnetic energy, and the energy depends on how they were generated.
Also, about those electron energy levels: they’re not arbitrary. They come from solving the Schrödinger equation with boundary conditions that reflect the structure of the atom. For an electron to maintain a stable, standing wave around a nucleus, its wavefunction has to reinforce itself—meaning it needs to fit an integer number of wavelengths around the orbital path, kind of like how standing waves work on a guitar string. If it doesn’t fit cleanly, it interferes with itself destructively and just isn’t a stable state. So nature only “permits” those configurations that mathematically reinforce themselves. Not every configuration can exist just because we can imagine it.That’s one of the deep principles of quantum mechanics: it’s not about anything being possible. It’s about only the physically consistent possibilities being realized. That might sound tautological, but it’s foundational. The math enforces the rules of what’s allowed. There’s no loophole where you think hard enough and suddenly particles tunnel through your desk to grant wishes.
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