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?
In: 9
It’s not.
Light is light. It’s some weird thing that we don’t really have any equivalent to in normal human experience. It’s not a wave and it’s not a particle.
However, in some cases, it appears to have similar properties to a particle, and other times similar properties to a wave. This led to it being described in some cases as particle-like or wave-like.
There is a parable about three blind people describing an elephant by feel–one claims it is a snake, one a tree, and one a rope. None of these are the elephant, but the elephant–in some areas–is snake-like, tree-like, or rope-like. This is similar to light.
As humans, we like to draw parallels to common experiences and relate things to our daily perceptions. We describe like-poled magnets as “having something between them”. But that is just a description of a particular result, not a statement of being. Quantum behavior is very, very foreign, and so almost any metaphor or parallel to everyday life will be imperfect at best.
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