Photon spin and Bose-Einstein statistics

It is shown that Maxwell's equations for the electric and magnetic fields free of sources can be inferred from Dirac's pair of first-order equations for a zero-mass, zero-charge particle. This result is interpreted as a Lorentz invariant form of the transverse nature of photonic propagation in which only two components of the spin-1 field exist in nature. Canonical quantization of Dirac's equations leads to a time average of the electromagnetic energy in agreement with the standard result of quantum electrodynamics. It is shown that the spin-statistics theorem is not violated for canonical quantization of the Dirac field provided the mass of the particle is zero. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.