system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does electricity heating a filament in a light become photons streaming into my eye?

I started thinking about this last night.  After a sleepless night and a significant amount of time trying to figure it out from information on the internet, I'm throwing in the towel and asking:  what is the process, from the moment I flip the switch to the time the photons hit the cornea?  What particles and forces are involved at what stages?  I'm relatively educated for a layperson, but not educated enough to construct the full flow chart:  HELP ME GET TO SLEEP TONIGHT!
gpt
It sounds like you have an incandescent lightbulb.  The electricity heats the filament because the filament is resistive, so the power = I\^2 \* R.  The filament heats up to a few thousand degrees Celsius (or Kelvin;  they're only different by 273 degrees).  It gets hot enough that its blackbody emission is partially in the visible range of the spectrum.  

The problem with such blackbody emission is that a lot of the energy comes out in the infrared, which is not helpful for us seeing... it just heats up the room.  This is why incandescent lightbulbs are inefficient, and you should upgrade.

Fluorescent lights put a greater fraction of their energy out in the visible.  There, a high voltage creates a current in the low pressure gas;  that current collisionally excites the atoms to put out UV light.  The chemicals on the glass of the bulb, the phosphors, absorb that UV light and re-emit it, mostly in the visible.  This "not-blackbody process" is much more efficient because much more of the energy goes into the visible spectrum.

LED lights take the energy of the electrons and "holes" on the two side of a semiconductor junction (the D, for "diode", junction), as they recombine and emit light.  By tweaking the materials, LEDs can be made to emit different colors of light.  Some even use the "phosphor" idea like fluorescent lights, to convert blue light to broad spectrum.   Again, much more efficient in terms of "fraction of light in the visible" than a blackbody radiator.

So no matter what type of light you have, a current is being processed into photons, via some kind of fun physics.