From Paul Kyberd
In a Mexican wave what seems to be travelling through the crowd is in fact a wave. Exactly the same thing happens to the atoms in a water wave.
Taroni implies that a photon of light is more real than a phonon, a pattern of vibration considered as a particle. The difference between the “immaterial” field and the rather more “concrete” particles can certainly make the systems feel different.
But in both cases the classical idea of energy transport by a wave acquires the characteristics of a particle when considered quantum mechanically. Photons and phonons have the same level of reality.
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