The concept of wave-particle duality is one that has been at the forefront of many scientist’s minds for decades. While going to university, budding physicists will spend weeks just trying to get a basic grasp of the key concepts of this topic.
While we won’t attempt to cover it comprehensively, it is a fascinating subject that everyone should have at least a passing understanding of as it has a dramatic impact on how the universe around us works.
For a long time, scientists believed that light traveled as particles, which is what Isaac Newton believed, and he seems to be correct. Other scientists such as Christiaan Huygens, however, thought it behaved like waves, and he seems to be correct as well.
How can that be?
The fact light can act like particles sometimes and waves at other times is something that has long been studied, and the wave-particle duality is one basic explanation. At the quantum level, our normal understanding of things really starts to break down.
To put it simply, light can behave as both a wave and a particle, depending on how it is observed.
If you want to make things even more confusing, scientists have found that matter can behave in the same way. This was first suggested in 1924 when Louis de Brogile found that electrons, which are known to be particles, can also behave like waves in some situations.
While for the average person this has very little practical impact on their day-to-day life, it is fun (or maybe a little scary) to think that the way we observe the world at a normal scale is, in some ways, entirely different than how it behaves when observed differently.
Wave-particle duality has an important impact on our lives through the use of technology. Things like lasers and some other technologies rely on this type of knowledge.
So, are you ready to take a deep dive into this concept now, or would you rather just continue to live in the comfortable ignorance about how things work?
Unlike light and matter, you can’t do both at the same time.