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Professor Feynman, in his “QED: The strange theory of light and matter”, states at page 15:

“I want to emphasize that light comes in this form - particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave - like particles.”

My questions:

  1. Many years have now passed since that book was published, is that statement still considered correct?
  2. If still correct, why do we still see the wave-particle duality being brought up in modern books? (If light is behaving like particles, there should be no need to talk about such a duality. Lamb in 1995 says that the wave-particle duality concept came from Bohr, and Lamb considers it essentially wrong/useless, but Lamb questioned the particle view, so his position seemed opposite to Feynman’s.)
Ang
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    I think one should be cautious when talking about 'particles' in the quantum realm, especially in QFT. In this last framework, an elementary perturbation of the EM's four-potential field is called a photon. It both fits the common's sense of particles and waves, depending on the experiment you use. At the end of the day, we simply shouldn't use the words 'particle' and 'wave' to describe a quantum particle because it only fits in its own category. – Jeanbaptiste Roux Sep 04 '22 at 10:30
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    https://allpoetry.com/The-Blind-Man-And-The-Elephant – WillO Sep 04 '22 at 11:33
  • @JeanbaptisteRoux I understand your comment, however I think Feynman refers to the elementary concepts of wave and particle as resulting from experiments. For example, the interference pattern of light from a double slit might seem an example of waves interference. In reality is the buildup of many single events over time as demonstrated by https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2539(08)61600-5 That said, the question is why we need to invoke any wave-particle duality. The interpretation of the macroscopic intensity pattern as probability distribution seems enough to just keep the particle view. – Ang Sep 04 '22 at 12:34
  • I found this discussion from 2014 about photoelectric effect I would like Arnold Neumaier, author of the first answer, to comment if still there is disagreement among scientists about particle nature of light. – Ang Sep 06 '22 at 10:42
  • Another very interesting discussion in this site – Ang Sep 07 '22 at 07:32

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