is light a wave or a particle?

18 Answers

• Kinda both

  Look at Wave-particle duality at the source

  :).

  All these other people who are saying wave have no idea about what they are talking about btw as they probably haven’t taken an elementary physics course and are simply using common sense, which is WRONG in this case.

  Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality
  AP Physics Student and Honors Physics Student last year

• Wave-particle duality says that all matter is a particle at any time it is created or annihilated and a wave at all time intervals between these two events. Light is made up of photons that travel as waves, but when they are emitted or absorbed in chemical reactions (photoelectric effect for example) they are particles. They can never be both at the same exact time, but exhibit properties of both depending on the circumstances I described above. This is a consequence of the Uncertainty Principle which says it is fundamentally impossible to know both a particle’s momentum and position at the same time.

  Emission and absorbtion are also types of creative and destructive processes. The whole ‘matter cannot be created or destroyed’ statement is actually sort of wrong because it is actually the energies involved that are never altered. Particles can annihilate and stop existing, just the same they can be created– emission as I said is a creative process– that photon wasn’t there before, but that energy was.

  Source(s): Kenneth W. Ford’s ‘The Quantum World: Quantum Physics For Everyone’

• Light is dual-nature. It behaves both as a particle and a wave. It behaves as a particle because it travels in a straight line once directed. No one as ever seen light diffract around a barrier like sound and water can. But it behaves as a wave because, well, it’s in the electromagnetic spectrum. It has a frequency, wavelength, period, and phase. Like a wave, it can be refracted when traveling through different media. Causing that weird effect you see when you’re standing in a river and your feet seem to be a little off to the side. Interestingly, matter also has a dual nature, as explained by the De Broglie wavelength.

  Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_waves
  http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/article…

• Light has a complicated dual nature. It shows evidence of being either waves (radiation) or particles (photons), depending on which experiment is performed.

  This is called wave–particle duality.

• Light is a wave which can be broken into a spectrum (the rainbow), which consists of light particles called photons. But light moves as a wave

• light can act as a wave or a particle.

  Light can exhibit properties of both waves and particles (photons). This property is referred to as wave–particle duality.

• No matter what people say, don’t listen to them if they do not have an understanding of basic quantum mechanics. Light is sometimes a particle, and sometimes a wave. It depends on how you treat it and how you measure it.

• Both.

  It can be a wave and a particle (photon).

  <3 Impe

• It’s a particle. NOT a wave

  Source(s): My brain

• Light is a wave.