Saturday Physics for Everyone: "How to Train your Photon", December 5, 2015

Just like dragons, single particles of light, called photons, are notoriously difficult to train; their shape depends a lot on the environment they are born into, they can be in multiple places at once, and they fly faster than anything else in the world. On the other hand, these properties make them extremely useful for accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks and for bringing us to new levels of understanding. But how do you get them to do what you want? I will give a quick photon-training tutorial to show how we coax single photons out of hiding and increase their powers. When photons are trained, they can do amazing things, like alerting you if anyone is eavesdropping on your conversation, telling you the answer to currently unsolvable questions, and telling us whether our theories of how the world fundamentally works are correct.