What is light???

[MCAT guy]

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So I have gotten pretty good with periods/frequency/sound/waves etc even though it used to be a major weakness of mine. But light doesn't make sense to me.

So light is both a wave and a particle. What the heck does that mean, I understand it being a EM wave but what do we mean by it being a particle? Like it is an electron or a proton while being a wave at the same time? So then is a gamma wave both a wave and a particle?

Can I think of a photon like I could a proton, except it is also a wave?

What is a packet of photons? These ideas are so abstract, I'm just trying to find some type of analogy in chemistry or something else I already know that will make sense.

 

[Charles_Carmichael]

Yes, the photon has both particle-like and wave-like properties (the wave-particle duality). Having both wave and particle properties means that it can exhibit wave-like properties (such as interference) and particle-like properties (like having a measurable momentum). In actuality, the wave-particle duality concept states that all matter has both particle and wave properties. Even things like baseballs have wave-like properties such as wavelength, frequency, etc (think of the de Broglie wavelength equation).

A packet of photons is referring to the quantization of photon energy. This means that the photon energies come at certain discrete values rather than being able to take any numerical value on a spectrum. If it helps, think of it like the energy values can only take the values of integers like 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. They cannot have values in between these numbers (eg. they cannot have values of 1.5, 3.22, 2.1, etc).

Hope this helps.