Androcles wrote:
Radio transmitters emit waves, waves can be focused into beams.
The inverse square law does not apply to Cassini-Huyghens at Saturn
or to single photons emitted by atoms/ions.
A photon is a wave of short duration, a single cycle.

You have an incomplete understanding of quantum mechanics. A photon
is not a wave. It is not a particle in the Newtonian corpuscle sense.
It has some properties that we commonly associate with both, though.
For instance, like a wave, it has phase and it interferes, but unlike
a wave (though like some particles), it cannot be divided in half, so
to speak, to yield a half-photon. It is not just a single cycle of a
wave.

Photons have an annoying habit of passing through more than one slit
of a diffraction grating used to measure energy.

It is only annoying if you don't do the math. If you do the math, you
find that it behaves completely as expected. The fact that we don't
find it intuitive is not an obstacle to it being so.

I think you are reasoning from popular science descriptions of photons,
in a realm where inaccuracies can be expected from such reasoning. I
also think you don't care, and will continue to insist your intuition
should defeat observation.

--
Brian Tung
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