So, yet again, what is the answer? Is light a wave, or is light a stream of particles? Well, actually it’s neither (or both). Light apparently is something different altogether, but it behaves as a wave when the experiment is designed to reveal its wave-like properties, while it behaves as a particle when the experiment is designed to show its particle-like properties. This schizophrenic personality of light is known as the “wave–particle duality.”
The type of experiment will show either light’s particle-like or wave-like behavior, but not both at once, which made Niels Bohr state that the wave and particle aspects of light are complementary to each other. The concept of complementarity derives directly from wave–particle duality, and states that all physical reality is determined and defined by manifestations of properties that are limited by trade-offs between complementary pairs of these properties.
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