The Photon is a wave!
The Photon is a particle!
Maybe the photon is both?
Wave - particle duality.... oooohhhoooo, big scientify words
The photon is not a wave.
The photon is not a particle.
The photon doesn't even exist.
(and i will try to show why, and what it really is here)
A wave is something, that something does
You see your friend waving to you as you walk up to meet him to gaze at stars.
Is your friend a wave?
No, he was waving.
A wave isn't something, it is something that a thing does in a medium.
An ocean wave travels through the water.
You cannot go down to the beach and get a bucket of wave.
And as much as you search the ocean's waters, you cannot find a wave.
It is a force that is travelling through the water.
Causing the water to form visible waves.
Similarly, light is not a wave. And scientists have discarded the medium through which light travels
Too many photons
So you and your friend are outside staring up at the starry sky.
And you both notice the North Star, Polaris, and start discussing all the ramification of it being always north...
Polaris is 323 light years away. And your friend is standing about 1m away, so doing the math and the angle between the photon you are seeing, and the photon your friend is seeing is 0.0000000000000003 degrees.
That means that star is putting out trillions of photons just to complete the circle
And trillions of trillions to complete the sphere.
In other words, if every star is putting out that many photons so that you can see it, then the entire mass of the universe is photons, everything else is trivial in comparison (even with photons weighing almost nothing.
Further, their isn't enough atoms in that star to make that many photons
(but that one is harder to show, just think of the number of photons a galaxy has to put out, that is much much further away so that we can see it on earth)
Photons don't even exist
If we look at a aether theory...
Light is a perturbation that travels through the aether.
Aether is the media through which the light waves
And this perturbation travels in clumps
Kinda like, you only notice the front of the wave smacking into you when you are standing in the ocean.
This is why scientist think that there is a "photon".
Because something seems to come and smack into the detection equipment.
A force, both as if something physical hit it, and an EM impulse hit it.
Thus these scientists, knowing that talking about the aether was verboten, decided to call it a particle and label in a "photon".
There is much more about light that shows that it is not a particle.
It just isn't really talked about in physics text books... well, because it disproves what they are trying to teach.
Such as, a photon is emitted going in two directions. (they call it two photons, exactly opposite) When one of these photons hits something, the other one disappears.
So, not only is the photon a wave and a particle it is in two places at once.
It is so much simpler to look at light as a perturbation in the aether.
Then all the data we see makes sense. Everything works out.