>>12639450The Ether is a medium through which light was supposed to propagate. Photons are one thing, the ether is another, the ether propagates the photons. Classically, we take light to be purely an electromagnetic wave, with an electric field and magnetic field essentially self-propagating, and hence not needing a medium to propagate through. This was confirmed by Michelson and Morley. So basically this tosses out the idea of an ether, and while future theories might resemble the ether in some aspect, the idea as it was originally proposed is not an accurate model.
Then the quantum revolution happened, bunch of shit went down, and we got QFT. It's my understanding that in QFT, photons are simply the quantum of the electromagnetic field. They aren't entities distinct from the field, that propagate throughout the field. They are excitations of it. I'm still an undergrad so my understanding of QFT isn't perfect, so take it with a grain of salt, but to my understanding this is correct. They aren't just two waves, one electric one magnetic, that happen to oscillate together, they are a quantization of the field itself.
For those more experienced, is it fair to call a photon an "excitation" of the electromagnetic field? Or is that term not appropriate in this use
