Light- wave, particle, photon, quanta, quark?
In Young’s famous…
In the famous Young's double-slit experiment, a coherent beam of light is directed through two slits and then onto a photographic plate. When each photon hits the plate, it makes a single, point-like mark, indicating that the photon interacted with the plate as a particle. But the overall pattern of marks on the plate is that of an interference pattern of bars, which is only possible if the light is a wave. The interference is the result of two beams being created by the two slits, which spread out from the slits and interfere with each other. Even more remarkably, if we dim the light until we are only sending through one photon at a time, we still get an interference pattern. This means that a single photon goes through both slits at the same time, interferes with itself in a wave-like way upon emerging from the slits, and then makes a single mark on the plate in a particle-like way. If this sounds nonsensical to you, it is because you are still picturing the photon as just a particle or a wave. Because the photon is a fluctuating probability distribution with quantized properties, it can do all these things in a completely sensible way.
Amazingly, all quantum objects from electrons to protons behave as quantized probability distributions, and not just photons. If you find a quantum particle/wave hard to visualize, don't let this difficulty tempt you to dismiss quantum theory as nonsense. Quantum theory has been experimentally verified in hundreds of laboratories for almost a century now. Additionally, the semiconductor chip inside the computer you have in front of you right now crucially depends on quantum theory being right. To dismiss quantum theory as quackery because its concepts are hard to visualize is to say that computers don't exist.
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/01/16/is-light-a-particle-or-a-wave/
But because we only detect one outcome — one solution to the wave function — that need not mean that the alternative solutions do not exist. In a paper he published in 1952, Schrödinger pointed out the ridiculousness of expecting a quantum superposition to collapse just because we look at it. It was, he wrote, “patently absurd” that the wave function should “be controlled in two entirely different ways, at times by the wave equation, but occasionally by direct interference of the observer, not controlled by the wave equation.”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/
https://bigthink.com/13-8/quantum-nature-of-light/
https://www.space.com/double-slit-experiment-light-wave-or-particle
https://global.canon/en/technology/s_labo/light/001/11.html
https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-is-light-a-wave-or-a-particle-162514