As far as I can tell, this &quot;buckshot theory of photons&quot; is a heuristic that is never actually formalized or used in serious calculations. In actual quantum optics calculations I have seen, a photon is a quantized excitation of a mode of an optical system, and it is definitely not localized to a moving point in space. There are &quot;wave packets&quot; that are somewhat localized in space and move together, but these are not the same as &quot;photons&quot;.