Recently I read in an essay by Wilczek:
"Photons are mixtures of weak B3 and hypercharge C mesons. It is those objects, not the emergent photon, whose properties are ideally simple."
Until now I thought that photons are elementary massless spin-1 bosons that arise as gauge bosons for the $U(1)$ symmetry in (quantized) electrodynamics. They can be described by a four-vector $A_\mu$ including two unphysical degrees of freedom that can be eliminated by introducing the gauge-invariant four-rotation $F_{\mu\nu} := \partial_\mu A_\nu - \partial_\nu A_\mu$ so that only the two polarisations (helicity $h = \pm 1$) remain.
Where does the emergence of the photon come from? Is this related to electroweak symmetry breaking and the Higgs field? Why are mesons (hadrons) mentioned??