I’ve watched multiple YouTube videos and read a couple things online and now I have a headache. It still doesn’t make sense to me.
If photons have volume, then there can only be a finite number of photons in a given space, right? And once that limit is reached, why can’t I squeeze in one more photon? What is stopping me, the “walls” or “shell” of the photons? What are the walls/shells made of?
Every source I’ve looked at agrees that light is BOTH a wave AND a particle. I can understand why waves don’t have mass, but then what the hell is a “particle”? Every other elementary particle like quarks have mass, right?
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Calling light both a wave and a particle is a tricky proposition. One person could tell you it’s both a particle and a wave and another could tell you that it’s neither. With added information, neither claim would be incorrect.
Here is the necessary information to make sense of it:
At the deepest level of accepted physics, it is an excitation in a quantum field. That’s all it is. That begs the question – what the hell is an excitation in a quantum field?
Fortunately, that question doesn’t need to be directly answered to understand the particle/wave relationship with light. All you need to know to get your head around this question is that both wave-like and particle-like behavior emerges from the dynamics of quantum interactions.
Thinking of light as a wave or particle is useful, but not universally applicable, so it doesn’t work as a description of light at its most fundamental level. It is still highly descriptive of how light works at other levels.
So is light a wave, a particle, both or neither? Yes.
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