At the end of the day the whole idea of fields, particles, waves, etc. is just a model to describe phenomena and make predictions.
It’s a very well supported idea and has worked to allow for some pretty impressive technologies to be developed, but at the end of the day it is just a model, we’ll probably have a new or slightly changed one in another century or two.
It is a little spooky though as it breaks the idea that one or the other is definitively the “right answer” which often makes people uncomfortable.
I covered it back in mecha a few years back myself, I got surprised by the result myself before I understood why it works.
And as an extension of Bryces main reply, there is the question (which is still definitively un-answered)
With what do we see colour?
Our eyes are only receivers of radiations within a narrow range of wavelengths (noting that this range does vary person to person) typically 380 nanometres to 780 nanometres.
So does our brain ‘see colour’ ?
Light striking a surface will (if the surface is coloured) be selectively absorbed so that we only receive the non-absorbed frequencies.
This all is simple to here… (with the assumption that ‘white light’ contains all possible colours)
BUT, if I pre-filter the light so that only Red and Green strike the white surface - what colour do I see?
NB this could be two discrete light sources so no commonality there either…
Both are reflected equally by the surface…
My eye only receives the red and green frequencies …
Yet I see YELLOW !
Does our eye somehow combine the received frequencies to become a different frequency?
Does our brain do the maths necessary to present the perception of yellow, instead of red and green individually (yet simultaneously present)?? And what exactly is white light - after all it can be
broken out into all possible colours with a prism… How are all of those processed by our Mark 1 eyeball / brain vision system?
Light can be just as mysterious and interesting now, as it might have been to a caveman looking into the colours of their first artificial light source - a fire.
