Probability Waves and Complementarity

The acceptance of light as composed of particles (or photons) led to another shocking realization. For example, if light shines on an imperfectly transparent sheet of glass, it may happen that 95% of the light transmits through the glass while 5% is reflected back. This makes perfect sense if light is a wave (the wave simply splits and a smaller wave is reflected back). But if light is considered as a stream of identical particles, then all we can say is that each and every photon arriving at the glass has a 95% chance of being transmitted and a 5% chance of being reflected. [Read more] ...