Abstract
The notion of the ‘light quantum’ is interpreted as a conceptual fusion in the sense of Gilles Fauconnier’s and Mark Turner’s ‘conceptual blending’ (2002). The notion of a black hole can be interpreted as a superpositioning of the everyday notion of a hole in the ground (into which objects, such as golf balls, can fall and disappear) onto the mathematical concept of a space-time singularity. Analogously, photons can be interpreted as a superpositioning of the notion of corpuscularity (from the Newtonian projectile model of light) onto notions of quantized energy of those ‘light quanta’ (derived from entropy and fluctuation considerations). Figs. 7.1–7.3 provide three variously finely resolved depictions of this interpretation which can only be performed in historical retrospect, unlike my prior diachronic reading described in Chap. 3.
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Notes
- 1.
See on the following Turner (2006) and Fauconnier and Turner (2002).
- 2.
De facto, though, here too the strands that are blended at a given time are identified only in historical retrospect.
- 3.
Each vertex, at which a photon couples to a charged particle, enters into the calculation as a factor \(\alpha \simeq 1/137\), for the so-called fine-structure constant. Therefore, processes of higher order have less probability. However, higher-order scattering processes are certainly not negligible because of their combinatorially rapidly increasing number. They can add up to nonnegligible totals (the so-called renormalization problem of QED).
- 4.
On later developments, see Kidd et al. (1989) as well as here Sect. 3.12 on QED.
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Hentschel, K. (2018). The ‘Light Quantum’ as a ‘Conceptual Blend’. In: Photons. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95252-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95252-9_7
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