Interesting i thought you needed the photons.
back to the question though or else RadicalPi won’t like us. How can light be a wave or particle depending on the experiment?
What’s the problem with that? I’m an uncle, a son, and a brother, depending on the person describing my relationship. I guess you could say I have uncle-brother-son duality (triality?). But an uncle, a brother, and a son are three different things, and there is no single person to whom I’m both an uncle and a brother.
yes but science is different don’t you think. waves and particles behave differentley.
Why would they not do an experiment that turns out one reult that can be made fact.
Because light (and other fundamental objects) are neither particles or waves in our normal everyday conception of them. Instead, they have properties that are both particle-like (discrete properties) and wave-like (they interact stochastically based upon a probability distribution and interference). This gives rise to the supposed paradox of particle/wave duality, but in fact, the paradox is only in our definition, as we have chosen to call elementary objects “particles” instead of using a neologism like “blobicles” to identify their unique properties. (The reason for this is historical and grounded in an effort to attempt to describe elementary particles in terms of classical phenomena.) Chronos’s analogy is appropriate; depending on the type of interaction you are modeling, you may treat a photon or electron as a discrete particle or a very tightly controlled waveform (called a wave packet). Like Chronos being a brother and uncle, the difference is in from what perspective you are looking at the interaction.
As for why interference with a system is always via photon, that is very simple: photons are bosons that carry the electromagnetic force, and this is the only force by which we can directly observe (and hence, interact with) other objects. Every sense that we, as human beings, experience, is some variation of a transfer of energy and information via the electromagnetic force; light (direct impingement on photon-sensing organs), heat (via radiation, convection, and conduction), sound (conduction), smell (electrochemical interaction with free-floating elements and molecules), and touch (electrostatic repulsion). Although gravity is definitely a part of our everyday world, it may be a surprise to many that we can’t directly observe it, either on a discrete or gross level; individual gravity wave packets (gravitons) or small gradients in the field are too low of an energy level to sense, and the effects we feel or observe from the effects of gravity such as falling onto pavement or watching a ball arc in a ballistic curve are inferred from electromagnetic reactions. The nuclear interactions happen on such a scale that we never directly observe them in normal conditions, and the amount of energy required to create a medium of free fundamental nuclear particles (quarks) and the more energetic leptons like the muon and tau particles) is far larger than exist in anything other than exotic high energy environments or particle accelerators.
Half Man Half Wit is also correct when he states that the multitude of interpretations that try to make something mystical about observations and their effects upon the outcome of an experiment are missing a fundamental point. While an unperturbed system will show distributed, wave-like phenomena, i.e. the two slit experiment without prior observation will show a distribution of electron that is consistent with wave interaction (even if you only allow one electron through at a time, precluding hypothetical interactions between electron), detecting the presence or absence of the electron “forces” it to take on path or the other, because the act of detecting it (or not) has influenced its behavior. This may seem counterintuitive, as we expect that the same action happens whether we are there to observe it or not per the normal rules of causality. However, causality is broken or at least severely traumatized on the quantum level, and interactions can occur that are distinctly non-causal. This causes a lot of distress for people who expect “particles” on the fundamental level to behave the same way as particles in everyday observation, but in fact, they’re two different types of objects. The lack of causality (or at least, local causality) on the quantum level isn’t really problematic, as for reasons too complicated to explain no useful information can be conferred by such channels and the sum of all events in a system are such that such non-causal events are loss in the noise (decoherence) such that everyday objects like a baseball approximate causal interaction down to any level of resolution that looks at the system or any major part of it. For that reason, gedankenexperiments like the Schrödinger’s Cat concept serve to highlight the absurdities of applying quantum phenomena to macroscale world behavior rather than present any genuine paradoxes. Or in other words, “things work different down there.”
Stranger