I usually see myself as being pretty solid on my general science knowledge, but this one continues to stump me.
Light is photons, little particles that move through space… but then it’s also a wave, like the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? How can it be both? How would photons red shift over great distances? Do we just not know what light is, really?
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First off, photons are always waves. Particles are essentially very narrow yet very high waves: a “spike”. This wave is not just an electromagnetic one, but also one of probability, the probability where it actually is. A particle is a thing whose position is pretty much known, while a wider wave has a lot of unknown uncertainty about location.
At the smallest level of reality, the realm of _Quantum physics_, everything is a kind of wave. Measuring or interacting (those two are actually the same thing) restricts the possibilities of where things might be, and with what chance. But unlike the everyday experience of _object permanence_, this is truly not a defined position; every position has a certain chance waiting to becoming more or less likely.
At macroscopic levels and many many atoms, those chances just average out, making the position of a rock all but completely certain. Hence why we do not observe rocks as probability “clouds”. This, and that looking at the rock would already mean that we determined its position.
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