@hightor,
Quote: “Look, I’m a big-picture guy. I say ‘Let there be light,’ you guys figure out if it’s a wave or a particle.”
And only when he said, “Let there be light” some 370,000 years after the B.B. did light come to be.
From about 10 seconds to 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was in a state known as the photon epoch. During this time: The universe was a hot, dense plasma of electrons, protons, and photons. Photons were constantly emitted—but also constantly scattered by free electrons. This scattering meant photons couldn’t travel freely—they were trapped, bouncing endlessly in a fog of charged particles. So although photons existed in abundance, the universe was opaque. There was no visible light, no transparency, no starlight or cosmic structure—only a seething electromagnetic cloud, as I have said previously. photons are the quantum of the electromagnetic energy, generally regarded as discreet stable elementary particles, but having zero mass, no electric charge, and carrying angular and linear momentum.
