Hello Dear Physics Explainer, Can You Explain To Me How/why Photons Are Both A Wave Form And A Particle?

hello dear physics explainer, can you explain to me how/why photons are both a wave form and a particle?

oh that’s easy. light isn’t a wave or a particle.

I mean that’s it’s not a wave, and it is also not a particle.

light is light. it is a strange substance that has a lot of strange properties. we can model the behavior of light in a few different ways, however. If we are working with light and we are interested in interference, then it is useful to model it as a wave and treating it as a wave will predict its behavior reliably. If we are trying to do something with the photoelectric effect, then it’s far more useful and predicative to model light as a particle.

think of it like map projections. this is the mercator projection:

it wildly distorts geography the closer you get to the poles, so it is not useful for finding the area of any sea or landmass; however, the lines of longitude are perfectly straight, which makes it a very useful map for navigation.

This is the Goode-homolosine projection:

This is quite a good map for accurately finding the area of landmasses. But because the lines of longitude point in different directions across the map, it’s worthless for navigation.

asking why light is both a wave and a particle is like asking why the Earth is both Mercator-shaped and Goode-homolosine shaped. It isn’t. It’s not. The earth is round. We just need multiple models in order to interpret it two dimensionally.

photons are quantum objects. the only way to accurately model them in totality is via quantum theory. but that isn’t useful for most of the things you’d want to measure photons for, because it’s much too complex. wave-photons and particle-photons are both practical simplifications of quantum-dimension objects.

not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.

Now I'm sad. o7 Clammy

You are angry about something. “Clam down,” I text you. You assume I have made a typo, but in fact I am holding a small soldier clam in my hands. He died so young. War is hell

Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore

Independent bookstores, and booksellers, get a lifeline just when they need it most.

Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.

The lifeline in question is called Bookshop. 

In simple terms, it’s a super clean, user-friendly online bookstore whose raison d’être is supporting independent bookstores — not simply with exposure or resources (though that’s certainly a factor), but with cold hard cash…

re: that last post, ive said it before and ill say it again: no one deserves to die (deserving is fake and death is bad) but some people need to be stopped and choose to make death the only way to stop them