Look bro. Your top level comment that I replied to was generally correct, and also very helpful. I liked it. I liked the suggestion for people to look at the Feynman diagrams. I agreed with it. I upvoted it.
I hope I’m not giving you the impression that I’m taking a personal issue with you. I’m not. I like you and I hope we’ll still be friends when this is all over. I promise to read Discworld soon.
The only quibble I had with what you wrote was this one sentence:
So for a photon to change course, aka accelerate, it does it by absorbing a virtual photon and emitting another.
Photons do not absorb virtual photons. And real on-shell photons do not interact. In Compton scattering and 1 loop photon-photon scattering, you can think of photons emitting e+e- pairs. But never do they emit or absorb other photons.
Maybe that’s not what you meant with that sentence, and I misunderstood. If that’s the case, my bad. Maybe you didn’t need the explanation. If someone else made the same misunderstanding reading your comment that I did, then maybe my comments will help them even if you don’t need them. Or if not, if it’s just me being dumb, well c’est la vie.