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“Emit” usually means as radiation. The photons that take every path are not on-shell.

When your refrigerator is open the light you see contains an amplitude of the photon going around Uranus.



Flashlight -> Jupiter

Refrigerator -> Uranus

What planet does the oven radiation go around?


> What planet does the oven radiation go around?

All of them, including planets outside our observable universe.

Same with the flashlight and refrigerator.

Each photon also goes into and through all the planets, and near each of their electrons in an infinite number of ways. They also go through all the stars, all the vacuum, etc. And with all the speeds, all the accelerations, ...

Most of these infinite possibilities are a negligible contribution to the final probability that photon-detected-at-B was photon-emitted-at-A. The non-negligible contributions come from the (still infinite) trajectories allowed by relativity and mostly from those near the lightlike geodesic.


Which part of the lightlike geodesic's infinite relativity trajectories does my toaster glow come from?


The whole glow? Treat it classically, it's mostly a solid-state physics problem. One individual photon, treated quantum mechanically? From a single inelastic interaction between a free electron and a metal cation. That origin marks one end of the photon's worldline. Repeating for large numbers of photons will make you quickly bored, so you'll probably want to look into the Stefan-Boltzmann law (which still includes the constant c and Planck's constant) and the concepts in Bohr's correspondence principle and effective theory.

More at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating> if you're curious.




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