Is light a particle or a wave?
Light travels as a wave and arrives as a count, and which one you see depends on whether a record has been written. Between records, nothing has been written about which route the light took. What exists is a spreading ripple with a phase, and where opposite amplitudes meet they cancel and leave dark bands. When a detector registers it, a record is written, and a record is an ordinary number, one count at one place. The pattern of many counts is the wave, and each count is the particle. Electrons behave the same way. In 1989 Akira Tonomura's group sent them one at a time and watched single dots build up stripes over twenty minutes. The old question of which nature is real leaves out one variable, the moment at which the reading is taken.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 28: What Is a Particle, What Is a Wave, and Why Does It Look Like Both?watch a universe make its own particles