Photons

 *  These musings attempt to wed some quantum dynamics with some classic dynamics -- seeking the limits of determinism.  Please disabuse constructively.
 *  Between Google and YouTube, one can read, hear and see every observation and theory learnable in an undergraduate physics course.  Yet I don’t find convincing descriptions and explanations of photon formation, translation and absorption – likewise with models of magnetism.
 *  For example, a photon is depicted as a train of electromagnetic sine waves, while it seems more likely to be half of a sine wave ie one phase or pulse (from zero to peak and back to zero).  If photons are propagated pulses, then one might imagine each photon produced by a charge translation from a higher-potential location to a lower-potential location.  One might imagine the photon’s spin orientation to be the direction of that charge translation and the photon’s translation to be transverse to that charge translation, the photon traveling like a frisbee not like a rifle bullet.
 *  I guess that spin is the photon’s magnetic curl and that the photon’s energy is in that spin, not in its translational inertia.  I suspect that absorption is the reverse of emission, that the photon hits it’s target particle always with it’s spin axis transverse to the direction of incidence, and it accelerates a target electron in the direction of its spin axis, the same or opposite direction as the charge translation that produced the photon, barring disturbance in transit.
 *  I presume that Compton photon-scattering angle depends on centering of the incident photon on the target electron essentially consistent with conventional interpretation, but I suspect that the predicted angle of electron departure may be wrong.  I was unable to find measured electron-departure angles.  By the way, scattered photons seem not to be quantized.
 *  Much of the above speculation derives from my dissatisfaction with descriptions of radio-antenna action.  Those descriptions are theoretical and practical, never analytical.  They imply that a transmitter emits giant photons.  This seems unlikely considering the distribution of events producing the carrier wave.  I wonder what an analysis of transmitter emissions would show?
 *  Finally, there are questions of photon emission and magnetic field formation in response to EMF in conductors of various geometries.  Emissions and fields about some specially shaped conductors seem paradoxical.  Does emission or field depend on what accelerates the electrons (EMF, magnetic change, thermal collision)?  And really finally, are charge-forces-at-distance mediated by virtual photons behaving unlike the photons we know and love?