Seeing Photons, from Einstein to Bohr to Hanbury Brown-Twiss and related Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference Phenomena

Why do we believe that the electromagnetic field is quantized, and photons exist? This talk will focus on two ways that the quantization of the electromagnetic field manifests itself in interference experiments. Bohr, who initially doubted photons after Einstein's initial proposal of the photon to explain the photoeffect, eventually proposed a thought experiment showing that the consistency of elementary quantum mechanics at the level of two slit diffraction requires the quantization of the electromagnetic field. In addition, as I will argue, both Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometry and the closely related Hong-Ou-Mandel effect provide yet another way to see that the electromagnetic field must be quantized.