system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Where do photons come from?

From my studies in physics and chemistry, there is always talk of photons being "emitted". For example, if an electron drops an energy level from an excited state, a photon is emitted. It seems that light, be it incandescent, phosphorescent, or fluorescent, always "emits" photons, as if they're just waiting around ready to be ejected. This seems silly, because then a lightbulb would run out of photons.

So where do they come from? Or am I thinking about this all wrong.
gpt
>So where do they come from

Perhaps this is the wrong way to think about this.  It is not like photons are being stored somewhere, ready to leap into action (as you already correctly pointed out).  Rather, photons come from the same place that any other type of wave comes from.  If you are standing in a pool, motionless, there are no waves, and you certainly aren't storing any.  But once you start waving your arms in the water, waves appear.  Perhaps it's best to think of waves as disturbances in a field (and if the field is in any way sensible, this disturbance will propagate).

So photons (which are just the quanta of EM-waves) are created when there is a disturbance of an EM source.  For example, the electrons jostling around in your lightbulb are charged, and so their thrashing about in the filament is creating a wave in the EM spectrum.  Photons are just the absolute smallest form of this propagated disturbance.

Hope that helped.