Chasing the Photon
Electromagnetism links phenomena across all scales, from atomic structure and chemistry to the physics through which we access the distant universe. In this talk, I will describe my own journey toward understanding the photon. We will try to understand what makes photons robustly massless, and see how they can arise from condensed strings or emerge in simple spin systems, including ones with little to no symmetry. Finally, we will speculate on possible UV completions of electromagnetic theories, and ask whether life could even exist in a universe without light.