The answer is yes.
Or maybe you had a more specific question?
I don’t know what the heck happened. Fortunately I copied my post so here it is below.
Over in this thread on shadows I got my butt kicked forgetting about the dual nature of light. However, it got me to wondering if physicists are really content with this explanation of the nature of light?
There are dozens of experiments done showing light’s dual nature. Do Experiment A and light behaves like a wave. Do Experiment B and light behaves like a particle. Scientists merely choose which makes the most sense for the experiment at hand.
For my part I can’t shake the notion that this is somehow just wrong. I’m not arguing with the results of the experiments but rather the notion that light can be two completely different things depending on how we decide to measure it. I know quantum physics has all sorts of counterintuitive aspects but this one is a bit too much for me. Does light really metamorphose into defferent aspects once it ‘senses’ us looking at it in a certain way? That’s a bit hard to swallow.
I guess what I’m really asking is are scientists content with this duality or do they believe there is something else going on that we just don’t understand yet that would essentially combine the two aspects into one, all encompassing aspect?
Quantum mechanics is an extension of classical mechanics. Classical mechanics treats matter as point-like particles, QM works with the particle-wave duality of matter. String theory treats matter as vibrating strings rather than point-like particles.
Relax; the wave/particle duality is an artifact. There is no true duality, only a single nature that manifests itself in different ways depending on the means of observation. Light, for the most part, acts like a wave; because its energy is quantized, however, certain experiments can make its quanta act like particles. Even individual quanta still follow certain rules of wave mechanics, though, because of the wavelike nature of their probablity equations.
The truest picture of light comes from thinking of light, matter, and energy as “things that happens to space-time.” It’s all the same space-time, but one distribution of energy/probability interacts with another in ways that we think of as “gravity,” “electromagnetism,” “weak nuclear force,” etc.
Nametag said it very well. Light isn’t transmuting from one form to another at our whim. It just has different properties depending on how you interact with it.
A very good book on the subject is “Where Does the Weirdness Go?” by David Lindley. The non-intuitive parts of quantum mechanics are all explained in clear, concise language.
Not particularly. While there is a description of electromagnetism in the same language as General Relativity, called Kaluza-Klein theory, it makes different predictions from Quantum Electrodynamics, and the experiments are all firmly on the side of QED. You can think of QED as something that happens in spacetime, but that’s not particularly helpful.
I will agree with you, though, that the apparent duality is just an artifact of our ways of describing things.
I think it helps, at least it helps me, to think of science as a way of making true predictions. It isn’t THE UNALTERABLE TRUTH. It is always more elegant to have a single way of explaining experimental results and making predictions, but if we don’t know enough to do that yet, we just have to make do with what we have.
There isn’t anything too mysterious about needing two ways to account for the behavior of light. After all, we think of gravity as a force between objects having mass, or as the warping of the coordinate system of space and time by the presence of masses. Which mode of thinking about gravity is most useful depends upon the question you are trying to answer, or the prediction you are trying to make. The correspondence between the duality of light and gravity isn’t exact. Warped space could be used for all purposes because it is more general than the force model, but it would be awfully cumbersome for most uses, like figuring out the velocity needed for near earth orbit. On the other hand, particles don’t explain interference in light and waves don’t explain the photoelectric effect.
Having written that last sentence, I’ll await someone saying, “Oh yes they do” and I can learn another new thing.
Light behaves like just one thing: light. It completely and consistantly behaves like light. The confusion comes from analogy. We try to think of it as either a water wave or a bullet, and expect it to behave as those objects would. But it is neither of those – it is neither a “particle” or a “wave” – and so it doesn’t behave like them. However, our limited experience and creativity make it necessary to compare light to something we are more familiar with, but that in no way imposes restrictions on the behavior of light.
-b