system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When electrons give off energy to return to their ground state energy levels in the form of light (incandescence), where do the photons come from?

It's my understanding that the reason things visibly glow when heated is that the electrons have been excited to a higher energy level, and in order to return to their ground state energy level, they give off radiation, some of which is within the visible spectrum, causing the glow. Anyway, when electrons "give off" photons like this as visible light, where do the photons come from?
gpt
What is a photon? Is it a particle? Yes, but also no. "Particle" is just a loose term we use to describe more complex phenomena on the quantum scale. It's more accurate to describe a photon as a quantized excitation of the electromagnetic field.

That's all that any "particle" is, an excitation of a field. For many particles you can't simply create a solitary one out of a bunch of excess energy, because of certain conservation laws. You can't create an electron by itself, for example, due to charge and lepton number conservation. But you can have a neutron decay into a proton, an electron, and an anti-electron-neutrino and keep the books neat and tidy (including mass-energy conservation). If you have a ton of excess energy you could create an electron and an anti-electron (positron) and also keep things balanced. And indeed, if you have the energy to spare, you can create such things out of nothing. Photons have no charge, all you need to be concerned about is conservation of energy and momentum, so anything that couples to the electromagnetic field can create photons if there's energy available to do so.