June 9, 2025

Kristie Kim 

10th Grade

John F. Kennedy High School 

Have you ever wondered how you can see the world around you? Your perception of a system, or an environment in contact, is made possible through the detection of light particles known as photons. Whether you are reading this article, glancing around your area, or catching a glimpse of something that is far away, you are constantly processing streams of photons that are triggering electrical signals directly to your retina. As one of the smallest discrete units of electromagnetic energy and carriers of electromagnetic force, these fundamental subatomic particles of light are crucial for our interactions with the universe. 

The concept of a photon was the subject of intense debate for many years, despite numerous scientific accounts. After first being introduced in 1690 as merely “light” in Christian Huygens’ paper titled Traité de la Lumière (Treatise on Light), countless studies and endless debate arose about the true form of light. That was until the German physicist Max Planck stepped in with a new explanation that energy is not continuous but rather divided into individual packets. Although physicists at the time were not able to grasp the ideas conveyed in Planck’s results, Einstein soon clarified the concept by introducing the photoelectric effect. Einstein determined that light indeed possessed the dualities of a particle and a wave, finally resolving the controversy. For this, the photon is now widely accepted as a particle, wave, and excitation in the quantum realm. 

Although photons are significant quanta of light in modern physics, their exact shape has never been confirmed. However, in November 2024, researchers Ben Yuen and Angela Demetriadou from the University of Birmingham proposed a new theory about photons after analyzing the interactions between light (photons) and matter. They concluded that there could be an infinite number of photon configurations and calculated the precise geometry of these quanta. As a result, they presented a groundbreaking identification and contribution to post-Newtonian physics, ultimately producing a precise visualization of a photon.