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2 points

No, they don’t. They can get absorbed and re-emitted, and the space they are moving though can compress sideways. But they can’t make curves at all.

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2 points
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Yes.

Don’t think about individual photons. Think about billions of them with destructive and constructive interference. The probabilities of all the sitting l additive waves of light.

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3 points

That’s basically all that refraction is. A dead giveaway is that light doesn’t move at the speed of light in them.

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16 points

The fact that light cannot change speed is one of the core axioms of relativity

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4 points
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But doesn’t relativity explicitly state that c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and travelling through other mediums explicitly changes and is explained by relativity?

I am 100% a layman and do not know the answer.

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6 points

That’s light as an aggregate wave. Photons, actual light, always travel at c. What’s happening in a medium is the rapid absorption and readmission of photons. The probability of admission is based on structure of material causing things like lens or mirrors to work.

You can think of it as the photons having to jump between platforms before the can continue running at c.

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