Visibility and virtual photon? Photons could be perceived as light as they could excite electrons in the photoreceptors of the eye as photons are the EM force carriers.
For transmitting electric forces of a stationary electron, the online sources point to some 'mathematic construct''virtual photons', which are not real physical stuff.
However, if 'virtual photons' transfer the electric force, it could also dislocate the electrons in the eye? In this sense, shouldn't 'virtual photons' be visible too?
 A: Virtual photons, as well as field lines are crutches, which helps us to compensate our missing idea of quantization of electric and magnetic fields.
What we know:

*

*charges of the same name repel each other, the electric fields of both charges behave like compressible media

*opposite charges lead to a weakening of both fields and to the emission of EM radiation (see the approach of an electron to an ion).

*The acceleration of charges also leads to the emission of photons and at the same time to the loss of kinetic energy.

*Static macroscopic electric fields arise from charge separation, static macroscopic magnetic dipoles arise from the alignment of magnetic dipoles of electrons in the material.

What we don't know is a deeper description that replaces the crutches of (virtual) field lines and virtual photons. Whereby then also the photon should be accessible to a deeper description (like instead of atoms protons, neutrons and electrons were described, and these again were described with quarks).
