Light Research

A little history into the physics of light.

At first light was believed to be an atom like particle. It bounced off things into our eyes and that's how we saw the world.
Then it was discovered that light behaved like and had the properties of a wave.
So which is it?

It's kind of both.

Right out of the bat I'll explain the thing about light that took me a while to wrap my head around. Every colour you see, everything in existence that is visible to you is emitting or reflecting light. When something reflects a certain colour of light it's absorbing the rest of the spectrum. For example if we're looking at something blue and the light source in the room is white light. That "Blue" object is really absorbing every other colour. It's atoms absorb, are made up of, every other colour in the visible spectrum and we define it as the one colour it rejects... Blew my freakin' mind.

Anyway, reflection is a property of waves, seems pretty straightforward, and the wave idea is helpful, because different frequencies/wavelengths relate to different colours, but when it reflects off something it imparts energy to that thing meaning it has some amount of mass and can't be purely electro-magnetic.
The mass containing part of light is called a photon and it's ridiculously tiny. If you have any idea how small an atom is, it's way smaller and lighter.

So what makes objects reflect certain photons and absorb others. The queer thing is that the photons themselves aren't being reflected. Every time a photon (a singular "piece" of light) hits something it is destroyed. It gives all it's energy to the atom it hits. When you give an atom energy it makes the electrons in that atom more agitated, but typically that lasts a very short amount of time, when the electrons calm back down they release a specific amount of energy (defined by the kind of atom it is, what element (forget molecules for the sake of simplification) and how the electrons are arranged). This energy usually comes in the form of another photon/wave of light and the colour/wavelength of that light is defined by the atom it was released from. Thats all particle stuff, but we define the amount of energy the photon has as a wavelength... a property of waves.

When scientist figured out that light does what it want's and has properties of the two, quantum mechanics was born to try and figure out what the hell was going. They're still in disagreement.

I didn't copy paste this either, fresh from my noggin and as well as I could simplify the really complex science that is light.