Thanks DaleSpam and jtBell. Sorry to belabor the point beyond your explanations. It seems to me that if a radiating source like a radio antenna at say a fixed frequency is emitting spherical EM waves this energy flux over a spherical surface should correspond to a large but finite number of...
Thank you DaleSpam. From the replies to my first post it seems that a given EM wave has many photons. So can we think of these photons as having a frequency distribution like a black body spectrum or are they all of the same frequency as the source (radio antenna) an in number such to have...
Thank you DaleSpam (a too modest a pen name it seems to me but I get the idea I think). Your explanation supports my qualitative picture of the situation. So at large distances (or even space-time? if this is a valid generalization) from the source, at some point the signal will weaken...
Thank you jtbell. Does this mean that a detector far from the radiating source, since it "sees" a classical EM field sees a large number of photons and if it doesn't it is because the source is so far away that the field and the number of photons is below the detection threshold of the detector?
Thank you marcusl. I guess I am groping for a picture of how conversion might take place from the energy in a (continuous) spherical wave to a localized photon somewhere in a unit volume per unit time. I suspect I am looking for too easy a bridge between classical EM theory and...
My understanding is that the EM field at r.t generated by a radiating source can be described as the amplitude of the EM fields at r, at time t. Is there a corresponding photon associated with that wave? A unit surface area at large r from the source will have less energy passing through it...