What's the big deal about the wave/particle duality of photons?

Question

If light acts both as a particle and a wave why can't it just be a particle that moves in the motion of a wave? There's no paradox! (Scientists wasting their time on more irrelevance it seems) Like a molecule (s) of water in an ocean current?


And how can photon have no mass yet it has a velocity? A =V squared and F=ma so F=mV*2 so M =F/V*2. If V= 0 then mass is null right? Does it exist? An electron has a mass right, so is a photon just pure energy or a particle with volume and dimensions in space time?

Actually its v =sq rt of (F/M)

This April Woman says photons does have a mass measured in volts! She contradicts herself!
Who measures mass in Volts anyways? It should be in grams or something like it.

So light is just a bunch of "massless" particles moving in a wave?
I still have trouble with the massless part do photons have volume or are they zero point particles?

Answer 1

Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = mc2. They also say that a photon has momentum, and momentum p is related to mass m by p = mv. What they are talking about is "relativistic mass", an old concept that can cause confusion (see the FAQ article Does mass change with speed?). Relativistic mass is a measure of the energy E of a particle, which changes with velocity. By convention, relativistic mass is not usually called the mass of a particle in contemporary physics so, at least semantically, it is wrong to say the photon has mass in this way. But you can say that the photon has relativistic mass if you really want to. In modern terminology the mass of an object is its invariant mass, which is zero for a photon.

Answer 2

the duality is there to explain different behaviours of photons and i don't think it is irrelevant, for example since light interferes, reflects, refracts and so on we say it is a wave, but the wave model does not explain why blue light makes a solar cell work but not red light. So here we need a particle model to explain it....blue light has to be made of different particles that have more energy and can send electrons flowing in wires

Answer 3

photons are probably composed of two or more particles orbiting each other in 10 dimensions.

all the "wave" behaviors can be explained as particle interactions with mass, so the duality only exists to provide job security to mathematicians.

photons don't actually travel, they attach to TIME which is moving at C.

Answer 4

Read here --

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/wonderquest/photonmass.htm