And now for something completely different…

Light… I accept that it’s a wave and a particle, but, I don’t think that’s the whole story… The wave/particle ‘dichotomy’. Why should it be one or the other?

I’m hypothesizing that photons exist all around us, currently invisible, undetectable while in a non-agitated state. When they are disturbed, they appear to us as light, analogous to how matter emits no sound until agitated.

I think we need to free ourselves of our current belief of what light actually is; letting go of any notion of brightness or color, or other properties perceived by the signals sent from our eyes to our brains by a delicate strand of nerve cells.

Returning to the hypothesis; if light particles are present all around us, the illumination we experience when a light source is introduced to our environment isn’t a stream of photons traveling in a steady one-way direction into our eyes, but rather the sinusoidal wave of light particles moving rapidly back and forth, similar to the movement of sound as particles of matter are vibrated and come into contact with our ears. A steady stream of sound particles traveling in one direction may emit a sound, but it would be more akin to white noise rather than the organized pattern created by the back and forth motion of a wave.

It’s a lot to take in I know, but if you really think about it, is it any crazier than the current theory of light being a wave until it reaches its destination, only then becoming a particle, traveling at the speed of light instantly upon creation, no period of acceleration, or more accurately ‘infinite acceleration’; instant light speed?

This new theory also does a good job of explaining some inconsistencies in light/electromagnetic wave theory, such as, if electromagnetic waves consist of photons, why can’t the photons pass through a Faraday cage.

So that’s a brief overview of my theory. I’m hoping that this blog starts a discussion about new ways to consider what light is and how it behaves. I just want to get to the truth, so it won’t hurt my feelings if my theory is debunked. Please leave a comment!