Or is that just currently the best explanation for something that we can’t necessarily comprehend yet?
Maybe it’s like those visualizations of 4d shapes where even the best explanations fall a little short of really explaining what is happening.
In:
It falls into a paradox based on observation. If you measure it in one way it shows it acts as a wave (diffraction, polarization, etc.). However, if you measure other traits, such as energy transmitted, that is only currently explainable as a particle, mainly photons. This has become one of the greatest debates in physics with Nobel Prizes being given for furthering our understanding.
[A great video about the topic by an Oxford astrophysicist .](https://youtu.be/HAeDBLUT9JA)
Light is neither a wave nor a particle. It’s its own thing.
Light occasionally behaves as a wave, and on other occasions behaves as a particle.
That is the math we use to discuss the behavior of light matches the math we use to discuss the behavior of waves in some circumstances, while in other circumstances we use the math that describes a particle.
working backwards from that truth understand that when this discussion was first being had, the mindset was inherently limited. We knew what waves were. We knew what particles were. But we had not yet invented the wavicle. It just wasn’t a concept we had.
It’s kind of like how any bland food meat defaults to behaving like chicken when we taste it. 🤘😎
In truth light is a disturbance of the electrical and magnetic fields. It’s its own thing.
So you know when you yank a rope up and down, the rope is a thing, and the wave is the up and downness? The wave is the energy you added to the rope, but it’s given formed by what the rope can and cannot do?
Light is the expression of the energy being added to the fact that electricity and magnetism are things that exist.
that is so unique that light is its own kind of thing just as it is its own thing indeed.
When you start getting to the fundamental fields and fundamental forces you have to learn to accept a kind of definite ambiguity. That statement alone is an example of a definite ambiguity.
It’s easy for us to deal with analogies to things we already know, but you have to sort of engage in a mental jiu-jitsu to imagine something that it is literally impossible for you to directly experience.
The world of the extremely small is extremely weird. We have to think of the quantum world much the way your cat would consider the internet. We experience it from what it does not for what it is. We have no sensory organs that function on the quantum scale. Your cat can see the pictures on the screen and be fascinated, but the idea of the wires behind it is not something it can conceptualize directly.
I know that was a weird and vague thing to say…
Much the same way we deal with infinity. Or the size of the Earth.
There are 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of H2O in a single ounce of water. This is not a fact you can deal with directly. So we write 6.022*10^(23) because we can deal with the little 23. And we compare the 23 to other numbers like it. We just count up the zeros and pretend we can deal with the really big number. And once you get the hang of not worrying about it you really can deal with those numbers.
Absolutely everything at the quantum level is like this. Electrons exist in little clouds of probability. That gives the clouds shape but only when you’re not looking too hard at it. And the reason the electrons don’t crash into the nucleus is that all the particles in the nucleus are also little tinier clouds of probability.The particle things that we say they’re made out of actually claim little volumes of space, because they might be there not because they are there. And stuff like that.
The real mind screw comes when you start thinking about the fields themselves. The universe is completely full of the possibility of electricity, and the possibility of magnetism. It’s like a thing that can wiggle. That’s right, the possibility of electric-ness is a real, tangible thing in a very real sense.
And those possibilities in those wiggles can gang up and burn your skin with sunburn, and push magnets apart or stick them together.
You have to sort of chase these ideas around in your head until you realize that the understanding of the metaphor is the understanding of the reality.
Once you zen to the whole idea that it’s a new thing, a thing you can’t experience directly, a thing you can’t touch, but a thing that acts like a wave when you expose it to the opportunity to do so, and acts like a particle when you expose it to different opportunities to do that instead It becomes okay.
because it never acts like a wave when it’s got the opportunity to be a particle, and it never acts like a particle when it’s got the opportunity to be a wave, it is not actually a contradiction.
The thing to really wrap your head around is the understanding that it’s not changing between being a wave and a particle, it’s just that as it’s circumstance is changed… As the light bumps into other forces… It does particular and well understood things. When the light goes through one of the slits and no one’s looking, it acts like a wave. when the light goes through the slit after being looked at, it acts like a particle. So that makes it a thing with those two properties among others.
(and don’t fall into the trap about being looked at. It’s not that a consciousness is looking at it. It’s that a whole bunch of equipment is looking at it. The universe observes itself all the time, and would continue to function as the observed and the observable thing even if there was no consciousness to be aware that these processes were taking place. Observer is not a metaphysical role, it’s a factual role of mechanics, electrics, charges, spins, interactions, and all sorts of stuff like that. When a photon hits a chlorophyll molecule, the molecule observes the photon. So science words are tricky like that even though they sound like the more words. when we talk about a photon being a wave or a particle we are using the words wave and particle in a specific scientific way.)
Edit: I’m stuck using a voice to text app, and it butchered a few of these sentences. I think I got most of them repaired.
When you look at anything with a big enough microscope, everything, including light looks like a wave. They generally behave as though they are waves that vibrate in up to 12 directions at right angles to each other, but with the curious behaviour that they can stick together, break apart, or bounce against each other like particles.
What isn’t clear, though, is what the wave actually is. Interpretations vary. Some say that it represents where the object could be given our limited knowledge of the position and movement of every other object in the universe at that point in time. The accepted explanation is that it is useless to think of the wave as anything other than a metaphor for what is known and unknown about the object.
The propagation of light and matter is governed by a wavefunction. This tends to spread out in space and diffract like a wave. However, it only describes the probability of finding a particle there. This duality applies to both light and matter, such as photons, electrons, atoms.
Although an electron wavefunction may be spread out in space. You will never measure just a bit of an electron. You will either measure it totally, or not at all, with a proability given by the wavefunction.
So you could say it becomes a particle when it is ‘measured’. They call this the collapse of the wavefunction. The next question is, what constitutes a measurement and why does it lead to wavefunction collapse?
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