{"id":235,"date":"2006-12-07T06:59:18","date_gmt":"2006-12-07T05:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=235"},"modified":"2006-12-07T06:59:18","modified_gmt":"2006-12-07T05:59:18","slug":"understanding-photons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=235","title":{"rendered":"Understanding photons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week, I took a phone call from a student at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.manchester.ac.uk\/\">University of Manchester<\/a> to discuss how I might contribute to the university&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.manchester.ac.uk\/alumni\/donorprogrammes\/alumnifund\/\">Alumni Fund<\/a>. I was a student in Management Sciences at the University of Manchester Institute of Science &#038; Technology (UMIST) from 1967-1971 and UMIST has recently merged with the Victoria University of Manchester.<br \/>\nMy caller turned out to be a young woman currently studying for an MSc in Photo Science. So, to be conversational, I asked her: &#8220;So tell me, Jennifer, is a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Photon\">photon<\/a> a particle or a wave?&#8221; She replied immediately: &#8220;It&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality\">duality<\/a>, Mr Darlington&#8221;.<br \/>\nWarming to my theme, I then asked Jennifer: &#8220;So do you think we&#8217;ll find the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Higgs_boson\">Higgs boson particle<\/a>&#8220;. Totally unfazed, she responded: &#8220;I don&#8217;t think so &#8211; but they are trying to locate it with the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/CERN#The_accelerator_of_the_future:_the_LHC\">Large Hadron Collider<\/a> at <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/CERN\">CERN<\/a>&#8220;.<br \/>\nAt this point, I decided to let Jennifer get on with the fund raising and I went to watch the television news on the latest car-bombing in Bagdad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, I took a phone call from a student at the University of Manchester to discuss how I might contribute to the university&#8217;s Alumni Fund. I was a student in Management Sciences at the University of Manchester Institute of Science &#038; Technology (UMIST) from 1967-1971 and UMIST has recently merged with the Victoria University [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}