Does light behave more like a particle, or like a wave? Today we know the surprising answer. Here's why it took so long to get there. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

Sam Baron receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Hi Ishan! Thanks for your great question. Light can be described both as a wave and as a particle. There are two experiments in ...

Light's behavior seems counterintuitive. That is, until you figure out light is a wave. The way light behaves can seem very counterintuitive, and many physicists would agree with that, but once you ...

The speed of light is a fundamental constant, approximately 299,792,458 meters per second. It's the same for all observers and hasn't changed measurably over billions of years. Nothing can travel ...

Thomas Young, born 250 years ago this week, was a polymath who made seminal contributions in fields from physics to Egyptology. But perhaps his most enduring legacy is proving Isaac Newton wrong about ...

The double-slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in physics and definitely one of the weirdest. It demonstrates that matter and energy (such as light) can exhibit both wave and ...

In 1676, by studying the motion of Jupiter's moon Io, Danish astronomer Ole Rømer calculated that light travels at a finite speed. Two years later, building on data gathered by Rømer, Dutch ...

Everyday experience tells us that light reflected from a perfectly flat mirror will give us the correct image without any deformation. Interestingly, this is not the case when the light field itself ...

Everything we see is due to visible light, the very narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves that our eyes can detect. Since it's difficult to visualize the wave properties of light, however, let's ...

Science is often viewed as utilitarian. We explore the natural world so that we can plunder its secrets for our own benefit. Indeed, this is often precisely the sort of science that funding agencies ...