How long is a photon?
Abstract
A photon has the strange property that it travels along a null interval with zero proper time, hence its emission and absorption points are, in a sense, a singular event. For their part, the emission and absorption processes have a finite duration which determines the spectral content of the photon. The question in the title points to the conceptual difficulty in `stitching' together these three intervals, which all correspond to the same physical entity but have fundamentally incompatible temporal descriptions. A previously developed model for quantum wavefunction propagation solves this apparent dilemma by formulating the life cycle of a photon in terms of recursive Fourier transforms on dual spaces. Because it doesn't treat space as dependent on time, and it is built on the Fourier transform whose phase is an invariant in special relativity as well as the foundation of the uncertainty principle, the model is a promising candidate framework for making quantum mechanics compatible with relativity. The model proposes to serve as an improved Klein-Gordon equation, or relativistically compatible replacement for Schrödinger's equation.
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BibTeX
@misc{nelsonisaacs2026long,
title = {{How long is a photon?}},
author = {Sky Nelson-Isaacs},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.14088},
eprint = {2610.14088},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14088},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - How long is a photon?
AU - Sky Nelson-Isaacs
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.14088
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14088
AB - A photon has the strange property that it travels along a null interval with zero proper time, hence its emission and absorption points are, in a sense, a singular event. For their part, the emission and absorption processes have a finite duration which determines the spectral content of the photon. The question in the title points to the conceptual difficulty in `stitching' together these three intervals, which all correspond to the same physical entity but have fundamentally incompatible temporal descriptions. A previously developed model for quantum wavefunction propagation solves this apparent dilemma by formulating the life cycle of a photon in terms of recursive Fourier transforms on dual spaces. Because it doesn't treat space as dependent on time, and it is built on the Fourier transform whose phase is an invariant in special relativity as well as the foundation of the uncertainty principle, the model is a promising candidate framework for making quantum mechanics compatible with relativity. The model proposes to serve as an improved Klein-Gordon equation, or relativistically compatible replacement for Schrödinger's equation.
ER -