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Originally Posted by afterburner
Ok, so if both mass and energy are attributes, and high enough enery can produce mass, then mass and energy are the same thing, just mass is A LOT more energ than just energy?
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Nope. Mass and energy are different. Think of $100 in gold being equivalent to $100 in dollar bills; same but different, right?
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How would a photon have more or less energy? what does that depend on?
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I can only tell you how to know when it has more -measure its wavelength. The shorter the wavelength, or higher the frequency, the greater the energy. Some people will wiggle much faster if they have more energy, too. (e.g. dancing)
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If photons have two distinct polarization states, then they are physical particles right? Just to clear up, what i mean by physical is this...Its physical if we "zoom in" enough then there would be "something" there...I know there is nothing that we can use to "see" photons individually, but in a hypothetical situation, if we stopped all motion(including photons)...
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Strangely enough, you can never stop or slow a photon regardless of what you think you are doing with your speed. No matter what you, or a fast instrument, will ever observe is lights speed will always be the speed of light. This was the breakthrough Einstein made with special relativity in 1905. He beat others to it. Also, elapsed time for a photon is always zero. Those photons from quasars taking billions of years to reach us, from our point of view, took zero seconds from the point of view of a photon (if you could somehow ask it).
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Otherwise, its very confusing to me that photons are "nothing" in 3d space, but they have these attributes like energy, spin, and so on. How could this be? Also if photons "have" energy, then matter "has" energy...
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I might be corrected, but photons are a form of energy, and not obtain energy unto itself. The idea of energy is a concept that extends to numerous forms, including light. Metals come in different forms, too. Energy, however, is not normally expressed as mass, unless you are a particle physicists.
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Would this mean that matter also has no volume, just "fields", which have volume, and we perceive as matter?
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I suspect you are simply redefining things. Suppose it turns out that the smallest thing to matter are some peculiar units of pure energy, it still would not change how we perceive and understand the behavior already established for matter.
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If these photons from the big bang were destroyed, then where did the energy go? even if they were replaced, how is that conservation of energy if they got destroyed?
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They didn't vanish into another universe, hopefully, they reacted with matter and raised the energy level of the matter accordingly.
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What i meant is the actual path of a photon. In textbooks the photon has a wavelength(in nanometers), with a peak and a trough...is this the case in reality, do photons fly through space in squigly lines or its just a straight line? Maybe i got somehting wrong again?
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It exhibits behavior identical to a wave as you probably would expect a wave to behave. It also behaves as a particle, too. Some call them waveicles.