I'm really struggling with grasping quantum physics. I'm a visual person, I like to be able to picture things in my mind. I started reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav last week. At first I loved it. The idea of infinite possibilities and even reality as probabilities appealed to me and made sense. I love Einstein's explanation of things as a watch that we know works, but we can't know exactly how until we open the case and look at the stuff inside. So we develop theories that explain how it works. We do experiments and if they explain observed results, then we accept the theories as "truth". Ok, I can visualize the watch thing. But what I can't get my mind around is the concept that light behaves as both a particle and as a wave. And that matter, the stuff we're made up of is the same.
I'm not doing this for a class, or because it's been assigned to me. I'm trying to understand things because I like to learn. Usually I read a book, or learn something, and it fits nicely into my little view of the world, it just expands that view somewhat. Quantum mechanics isn't doing that. It's not fitting in. I read somewhere the other day about the super string theory, which tries to explain the duality of light/matter acting as both a particle and a wave. That helped a little, but I cant get the picture out of my mind of a bunch of scientists in lab coats running around spraying silly string into the air and trying to explain the universe by watching it float to the ground. It doesn't get me any closer to understanding quantum theory, but it sure makes me smile. That's part of life too.