special relativity in relation to light waves?

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Are there any physics majors who have knowledge on the topic?

My question is essentially this: what does special relativity offer regarding photons and their ability to move in sine waves without a medium?

I'm curious as to what the evidence is that leans in this direction.

Thanks

Special relativity doesn't explain ability of light to exist without medium. The question is: Do we need to explain that?
It also doesn't tell anything about relation between wave and particle nature of micro-objects. That's the area of quantum theory.
And I wouldn't say that photons move in sine waves. I think you are imagining it wrong. But don't ask me how to imagine it right.

It IS an area of quantum mechanics. With every particle (like a photon) comes a wave. The wave tells us some probabilities about the particle's position and momentum, and somehow, it can interact and interfere with other probability waves. If you want to know about general relativity, though, don't ask quantum mechanics. the two contradict eachother very strongly, which is why everyone's all excited about GUT's and TOE's and string theory.
also, what i said may not have been 100% accurate (i'm not a physics major). if i got something wrong, i apologize.

I think the OP's question is, does SR have anything to say about the "aether" not existing?

The possible answers would be:

1) SR reinforces the lack of the existence of the luminiferous aether.

or

2) SR has nothing to say about the matter.


My cognitive faculties are scrambled tonight, so I don't know the answer.

Er wait, maybe I can manage a coherent thought, here...

SR contains as an axiom that the speed of light is the same for all inertial observers (all non-accelerating observers, basically). So, I think that right there shoots down the aether.

That is, if you tried the Michelson-Morley experiment as a thought experiment and analyzed it from the POV of SR then M-M would give you a negative result.

MM experiment was one of the experiments that led to rejection of aether theory. MM experiment was also important because it was a strong hint for constant speed of light.

Yeah, but the OP's question was about what bearing SR had on the matter of the aether.

This probably sounds a little crazy, but I wonder if when they discover "gravitons," (if ever) there will be a lot of similarity between them and photons?

well, they're both massless particles... they just have different spins. It's entirely possible, likely, even.

Now what would be REALLY weird is if, somehow, they got the spin wrong, and photons were gravitons all along. Everyone would feel like complete idiots.

But it's unlikely that'll happen. They probably have the spin right.

One thing that photons & gravitons would have in common would be that they both obey Bose-Einstien statistics (meaning that more than can pile up into the same quantum states).

oh yeah, that thing... is that the same as the pauli exclusion principle?

^ The exclusion principle is the complement to B-E statistics.

That is, particles are either bosons (integer spin), which follow B-E statistics,
or
fermions (half-odd integer spin) which follow Fermi-Dirac statistics, which is also known as the Exclusion Principle.