Quantum Mechanics is definitely not pedestrian, and the photon is its most fundamental and elusive elementary particle. A picture of the photon, described in terms of classical mechanics is doomed to be incomplete, or even wrong.
Yet, I do need a picture for my pedestrian physics,
Maxwell’s equations could be a description of a dog, chasing its tail. A photon could be a circle made up of electric and magnetic fields in endless pursuit of one another. When ejected, the translational motion changes it to an open spiral of one turn. The envelope will be a cylinder and in the ballistic model this cylinder is thought of as a bullet.
The photon is classified as a boson with spin ±1. If I understand this correctly, it implies that the translational velocity vector and the angular momentum vector are collinear, the spins corresponding to right and left handed spirals.
If the source is in motion, its velocity vector is added to the ejection velocity vector of the photon, changing the magnitude and direction of the momentum vector. The size, content and shape of the cylinder are not affected.
The model lends itself to quantitative descriptions. For my purpose, I stipulate:
The word “photon” represents an energy quantum anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum (ot just in the visiblr light sector)
Each photon is represented by a constant ‘r’ with dimension length. If all mass were constrained to the rim of the circle, ‘r’ would be the radius.
The peripheral speed is ‘c’.
The ejection speed is ‘c‘.
The angular speed is ω = c/r
The period is (2πr/c)
The frequency ν = 1/(2πr/c) = c/2πr
The energy hν = h c/2πr = ℏc/r (ℏ is the reduced Planck’s constant)

The central angle, ϴ = ct/r
Photons are ejected one by one and, with the exception of laser emission, in a random fashion.
Radio signals are generated as a stream, with one radio “photon” seamlessly attached to the next. As a result, the quantum aspect wanes and a wave pattern emerges.
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