How can light be a particle and wave, or have both properties?
In: Physics
It is because in reality, nothing is a perfect particle or a perfect wave. Classical waves and particles are concepts created by people in order to model systems, they work fairly well on a human scale and so match our intuition. Down at the atomic level there is no reason for these concepts to hold true, sometimes quantum objects behave more like a classical particle, sometimes more like a classical wave. In reality it is neither, they are just following the laws of quantum mechanics, this makes it difficult to comprehend because we don’t have an intuition for how these systems work. Light isn’t a particle, it isn’t a wave either, it is a quantum mechanical phenomenon which in some regimes can be modeled as a classical particle, and sometimes a classical wave but the reality is more complex.
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