Electromagnetic Radiation Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 195):

The work of Planck and Einstein had established that heat radiation and light (and, indeed, all forms of electromagnetic radiation) could not simply be explained in terms of electromagnetic waves, but would also behave, under some circumstances, like a stream of particles, now called photons. Planck's constant defined the amount of energy carried by each photon associated with a particular wavelength of radiation. The photons are like little packets of energy — quanta, as they became known.

 

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, electromagnetic waves are physical potential that is instantiated as a stream of particles, with the peaks of the waves measuring the most probable location of each photon in the stream. 

The particular wavelength of radiation is thus the most probable distance between photons in a particular stream, and the amount of energy is thus proportional to the frequency of photons in a stream, where energy is the ability of a process mediated by a particle to unfold.