Is Light A Wave Or A Particle

Light as a particle.

Is light a wave or a particle. But what is it really. It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other while at. Classically light can be thought of in two ways. Light sometimes acts like a wave and sometimes acts like a particle depending on the situation.

Since light has energy momentum and a wavelength and matter has energy and. So maxwell s equations do say that light is a wave. This only makes sense if you accept that light is something more complex. Either as a particle or a wave.

This is the form of the wave equation. When a wave of light is transformed and absorbed as a photon the energy of the wave instantly collapses to a single location and this location is where the photon arrives this is what is called the wave function collapse. Light is a particle a photon that acts like a wave both a particle and a wave which can be measured as an excited quantized state of the electromagnetic field. Something that from a certain perspective looks wave like and from another perspective looks particle like.

As albert einstein wrote. Light wave particle duality quantum field theory and the copenhagen interpretation. Matter is a wave and a particle. In the 1920s a young physicist named louis de broglie made a radical suggestion.

Wave particle duality is the concept in quantum mechanics that every particle or quantum entity may be described as either a particle or a wave it expresses the inability of the classical concepts particle or wave to fully describe the behaviour of quantum scale objects.