“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the Weather.”

I’m not sure that’s how it works. Is it?

depends. sunlight is #edd59e

Have fun.

Or both

A photon is a quanta of light. Our picture of light, to this point, has been that of a wave. Wave-like characteristics are responsible for diffraction and refraction. However, light is absorbed and emitted one photon at a time.

I knew some new study would betrayal me, well I still wave my particle…

The word “quanta” in this context means discrete units of energy. It is a general term; in the case of electromagnetic energy a quantum is a photon.

Mindbogglingly, light behaves as both particles and waves, not neither. The best explanation I’ve seen for this so far is this video about quantum fields.

Quanta is just a word (related to quantity) as in: “smallest divisible quantity of”

So in the case of light we would be talking about photons, which are a quanta of light (e.g. discrete “packets” of light).

Light behaves as a wave, e.g. we can talk about the frequency of light. But it’s also pretty different from macroscopic waves e.g. it’s not accurate to think of them as what your see on a typical sinusoid graph, as at that level things don’t really have a fixed shape or position, we’re talking more about areas where they “probably” are (see: superposition, HUP etc)

It’s useful to think of light in terms of discrete photons for a number of reasons, e.g. in pair production, 1 gamma photon would be sufficient to create 1 electron/positron pair.

Photons also exhibit other particle-like behaviour despite having no rest mass. But the idea of rest mass becomes less significant at that level anyway as the line between energy and mass (e=mc²) gets blurred. And any sufficiently high energy object will likely exhibit some massive properties (hence why we tend to use MeV - a measure of energy - instead of a measure of mass, even when performing calculations with massive particles such as electrons.

All small particles do, they’ve done the double slit expirement with atoms and molocules

I think the best way of thinking about it is that it’s neither. Vaguely speaking, “quantum stuff” can be described very well by math, and this math has some elements of “waveness” (think wave equations, interference) and “particleness” (think ladder operators or maybe position eigenstates). But that doesn’t mean it’s one, the other, or even both — it’s described by some math, and that math is agnostic as to what you call it.

In our macroscopic experience it’s easy to divide the world into these two convenient buckets, but the reality is different.

Personally I think this weirdness is exploited by popsci to get more clicks, but maybe that’s just my jaded opinion after years of grad school…

It’s easier once you understand that they are not both, particles are actually a type of wave 🙃

Reality is an illusion, it’s waves all the way down, these meat prisons hallucinate solidity to cope with the presence of complex force interactions they can’t properly perceive, Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

That’s a good cat name.

Are you saying all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves?

light can be glad there is no space police. That’s illegal.

This kinda falls apart once you realize that all small particles (atoms, electrons, molecules, etc) have wave particle duality.

This medium you’re talking about is called “aether” and was disproven in 1887.