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Geschichtsklitterung t1_iyf8dlo wrote

As others have said, light's behavior depends on the circumstances.

Demonstrating its wavy nature is very easy. All you need is some point light source (e. g. a dia projector with a piece of carboard with a small hole over the objective, a street lamp far away, &c. – do NOT use a laser, you don't want to shine that in an eye) and a piece of aluminium foil with a pinhole in it. Looking at the first through the second you'll see an Airy disk with some rings around it.

It gets mind-blowing if you make a second pinhole in the foil, as near as possible to the first one. Can you guess the result? Spoiler: >!You'll still see the disk and rings, but now with dark interference bands over them.!<

But exhibiting light's particle behavior is difficult and would need a physics lab. You can look up Einstein's 1905 Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, it's about that.

The next best thing would perhaps be a cloud chamber video?

So the somewhat unsatisfying answer, as we crave clear-cut ones, is that a quantum is neither a particle nor a wave but… a quantum, even if it can behave like the one or the other, depending on the question asked (the experimental setup).

Somebody gave a metaphor for that. Take a cylinder. Seen from one direction it looks like a disk. From another, like a rectangle. Yet it is neither.

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