Is a photon simply a vibration of the spacetime lattice?

[phinds]

I think that your initial question deserved a response and got one. The next step is for you to study those answers and the basic relevant physics. On such a complicated subject, that may take significant time and effort, but it is a very interesting subject. You will undoubtedly have more specific and scientific questions as you study. Those type of questions are welcome. But without further study, there are many more speculative theories than anyone can possibly answer. IMHO, this is not the place to try.

 

[phinds]

@Curiousphy to expand slightly on my previous answer, and along with what factchecker said, PF has tried speculative sections before, but here's the problem. Before you can meaningfully "think outside the box" you have to know what's IN the box. Speculative posts pretty much never go anywhere useful, and as I said, PF has tried it and found that it definitely does not work. So much so in fact that I can imagine the mentor's response on seeing you asking for it once again (which happens about once a month).

 

[Ibix]

Science is like a jigsaw puzzle. Only we don't have all the pieces and we don't have the picture on the box. We have experimentalists out there hunting down the back of the sofa for pieces and putting the pieces we have together in different ways. And we have theoreticians suggesting ways that bits might fit together and trying to work out what the picture might be.

Newton suggested the picture was a mountain. Maxwell suggested it was two mountains. Einstein realized the mountains were identical, and suggested it was one mountain, reflected in a lake.

The problem with "speculation" by non-experts is that they've only read vague descriptions of the jigsaw and have no idea what we know fits together, nor ways it cannot fit together. So your "spacetime lattice vibrations" is a bit like barging in and saying "maybe it's a cat!" While I'm perfectly happy to point out that it would be a very strange cat with trees and a snowline and discuss the evidence for it being a mountain and a reflection, addressing in detail why it's not a cat is not an efficient way for you to learn. And a mountain is so clearly not a cat, I'm not likely to learn anything.

Frankly, making speculations based on (at best) vague pop-sci descriptions is a waste of your time. A mountain is not a cat. And answering you becomes a waste of mine if you keep doing it. Nor is a mountain a dog, nor a mouse, nor a chicken, nor a... A billion blind guesses is not helpful - it's just noise.

If you want to contribute you need to put in the time to learn the maths and the evidence so that you actually know what is known. What is plausible and what is not. It is hard work, but it's absolutely fascinating and strange.

If you don't or can't do the studying, that's perfectly fine. But you have to accept that ideas you come up with without study are like wondering if the mountain might be a cat.

 

[Dale]

I guess these would be unresolved mysteries per current knowledge?

I wouldn't say that either. As far as I know there is no meaning to the phrase "displace spacetime". There isn't a standard scientific meaning for the term, and you don't appear to have a specific meaning in mind either, in terms of either experimentally measurable quantities or things that could be calculated from other quantities. So it isn't an unresolved mystery, it hasn't even been defined well enough to merit the status as a mystery let alone an unresolved one.

You may as well ask if the farglesnap is a flubnubitz. It is not an unresolved mystery, it is an undefined question. One of the most important things that we do as scientists is to define our questions so carefully that they can be answered by performing an experiment. When a question is posed with that level of clarity and the answer is unknown, then that becomes an "unresolved mystery".

I am just in my little curiosity quest to make sense of the world

I applaud that. Over the course of the last few centuries we have made enormous strides towards exactly that goal. I would strongly recommend seeking to learn that. Even Newton famously "stood on the shoulders of giants" to learn and understand how the world works. Physics Forums can help you in that goal.

In the meantime, I am going to go ahead and close this thread as the original question has been answered to your satisfaction, and I don't want to engender bad feelings in the community with this tangent.