 It's a funny old thing, light. Sometimes it behaves like a wave and other times like a particle, and that's where the humble photon comes in. Good old Albert Einstein coined the term in 1905, explaining that the photoelectric effect (where UV light strikes a surface |
causing the emission of electrons) was due to light being made up of a stream of energy packets called "photons". The Star Trek universe pinched the word rather spuriously to describe a kind of torpedo but apart from a twinkly light when they're fired and the release of a whole lot of photons when they explode something, they're not really connected at all. DP |
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