electromagnetic radiation - Frequency of light versus frequency of electron vibration

I've been trying to understand photons and light, although entirely conceptually (layman with not much of a background here, but I really want to understand this a bit better) and there's a couple of things confusing me.

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As far as I understand, when an electron "vibrates", it causes a change in the magnitude of the electric field that electron sends off into space.

This change in the electric field is felt by other electrons on other atoms sometime later (because light doesn't move at an infinite speed, it moves at some specific speed, which is the speed at which "changes in the strengths of fields at a distance are felt" move in, in our universe), and that causes electrons on other atoms to vibrate.

I'm not sure WHY electron $A$ vibrating relative to electron $B$ causes electron $B$ to vibrate...I was told by someone it had something to do with special relativity and the space that electron $A$ occupies becoming smaller...but it went way over my head. Anyways, I'm willing to accept that electron $A$ moving causes electron $B$ to feel a force and vibrate as well. But, when electron $B$ vibrates, electron $A$ stops vibrating...otherwise, energy wouldn't be conserved. Although what actually physically stops electron $A$ from vibrating...I have no idea...

We call the transfer of the vibration from one electron on one atom to another on another atom "light".

The higher the frequency of the originally vibrating electron, the higher the frequency of the electron that feels the changes in the field. This corresponds to higher frequency electromagnetic waves.

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The above was just to explain my (low) level of knowledge on this. My questions are these:

1. 
   

   When people talk about the "frequency" of light...is that the same thing as the "frequency" of the vibrating electron producing that light?

   
   
   


2. 
   

   Does one cycle of the vibration of the electron mean the production of one "photon"?

   
   


3. 
   

   If the answer to the above question is no (which as of editing this post, I think it is), then this is a follow-up question: Once an electron gets "hit by a photon" (whatever that means) and it starts "vibrating" with some frequency, for how long does it do that? I know it seems like an odd question to ask, but here's the thing - if the electron were to speed up into its vibration, and slow down, so that its frequency of vibrating changes throughout, then according to the equations I've seen that would mean the electron would emit light with multiple energies. But...that goes against the whole concept of quantization and photons, right? In short, if light is quantized, what does that mean in terms of the electron that started vibrating? Does it mean that the electron SUDDENLY starts vibrating and SUDDENLY stops, and when it stops it emits the last photon? Does the vibrating electron only emit a single photon?

   
   


4. 
   

   This is a follow up to the previous question - What is the connection between the "vibrating electron causes changes in the field it produces that causes other electrons elsewhere to vibrate" theory and the "excited electron sends off a single photon that hits another electron and excites it" theory? How do the vibrations and changes in field magnitudes correspond to the photons?

   
   

Or am I entirely and utterly confused?

Thanks!

Answer

I'll have a go at a hand-wavy explanation which assumes that you are comfortable with the idea of an electromagnetic field. If you're not, let me know and I'll address that in an edit.

Light is ripples of electromagnetism. When people talk about the speed of light they mean how quickly the ripples travel through space. The frequency of light is the rate at which the ripples vibrate.

Most sources of light produce ripples with a mix of frequencies.

You can (very very loosely) think of the intensity of the light being the height of the ripple, so the more intense the light the more pronounced the ripple.

Experiments have shown that it takes a fixed minimum amount of energy to set off a ripple of a given frequency. That minimum energy is given by hf, where h is a tiny number known as Planck's constant (named after Max Planck) and f is the frequency of the ripple.

You can, very loosely again, think of a photon as the tiniest ripple you can make of a given frequency. If you want to increase the intensity of the ripple you have to build it up in units of a photon. So you can think of a beam of light as being the cumulative effect of billions of tiny ripples adding together to make a bigger effect.

Photons are (again loosely) given off by charged particles, in circumstances in which the particle loses energy which is transferred into the photon ripple. The frequency of the photon is given by e/h, where e is the energy taken from the charged particle (and h is Planck's constant again).

It's not right to think of the charged particle 'vibrating', so you can't think that the particle has a frequency of vibration that's linked to the frequency of the photon, although that is a tempting image and would be in keeping with classical ideas about electric fields.

Indeed, one the reasons that made physicists realise that there was something wrong with classical electromagnetism was that they imagined electrons orbiting in atoms like tiny planets, and classic electromagnetism said that the electrons would indeed create ripples as they orbited. That would mean that the electrons would be radiating off energy all the time, so they would soon slow down and spiral into the nucleus. The early ideas of quantum theory were that the electrons could only exist in certain orbits, in which they didn't create ripples, and that the ripples only happened when an electron 'jumped' from one orbit to a lower one. The energy given off by a single jump was the minimum needed to start a ripple, or in other words to create a photon.