The problem with the wave-particle duality is that it's a poor description of the phenomenon that's often more confusing than it is enlightening. Imagine a bio

The problem with the wave-particle duality is that it's a poor description of the phenomenon that's often more confusing than it is enlightening. Imagine a biologist describing a creature which has human-butterfly duality. If you measure its number of legs, it turns into a human. If you measure its number of wings, it turns into a butterfly. If you measure whether it can ask for a cracker, it turns into a human. If you measure whether it's brightly colored, it turns into a butterfly. It's constantly shifting back and forth between these two completely different species. Of course, it might be simpler to just call it a parrot. The problem with many explanations at quantum mechanics is that they present light or matter as shifting between being a particle and being a wave. A common symptom of this is that people say light has a wave-particle duality, despite the fact that the properties that they're describing are universal and not just related to the nature of light. A better description is to say that everything follows the Schrodinger equation and that, at certain limits, we see a set of properties that we refer to as particles while, under a different set of limits, we see properties that we tend to call waves. It's not that light switches between being a wave and a particle; the terms wave and particle are simply not complete enough to describe the properties that light possesses.