There is an ancient question that we have been asking since the Egyptians: what is light and what is it made of? Throughout the history of science, different people have given different answers to this question, and it has evolved. In the 20th century, we came to understand light as something formed by minimal, indivisible energy elements, which are photons. While they behave like corpuscules, they also have a certain wave-like character – in the sense that, when experimenting with light, it manifests phenomena characteristic of experiments that we do with other types of waves, such as water, and with other types of matter, like a soccer ball. So, we say that the photon is neither a particle nor a wave, it is a quantum, a minimal element of something. In fact, it’s something very complex, because we want to think of the photon as a ball of light, but it’s not. It’s something that we really have a hard time understanding with our current way of thinking.
The adventures of light and its quantum phenomena
September, 1st 2023
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