Author's
Note: This piece is about light and it explains how light is both a particle
and a wave. I used examples,
comparisons, and retold how Einstein made the discovery of light being a
particle. The pictures and diagrams are
a visual aid of the concepts that I am trying to explain.
Many believed as
recently as the turn of the last century that light was just a wave, but in
1905 Einstein discovered that it was also an object, a particle. Objects can be affected by gravity, but waves
cannot. On the other hand, waves cannot
be touched or felt, but particles can.
This is where most people would stop here and conclude that light is a
wave, but what they don't know is that light can actually move due to
gravity. 
In some ways light
is a wave. If you compare light and
sound, they both have some similarities.
They both radiate and can amplify by diffracting and reflecting off of
other objects. Changing with the number
of different waves is also something that occurs in both light and sound
waves. The wavelengths can change color
and pitch, and the amplitude can change the brightness and volume. Although in many other ways they are
completely different. When someone far
away from you talk the amplitude of the wave stretches out making it harder to
hear and the sound will fade, but if you are far away from the sun you can
still see it because the waves are consistent.
Light waves are smaller and faster than sound waves. That's why sometimes you can hear what you
can't see. 
Light has some
qualities of a particle that a wave would not have. For example, if a light is shining at a
screen with a hole through it, light will stop and hit the screen like a
particle, but it will also go through the hole and end up on the other
side. That example demonstrates one way
of how light can be both a particle and wave.
All Einstein needed to do was corroborate that light was a
particle.
To substantiate
this, he conducted a little experiment.
He waited for a day where there would be an eclipse. The gravitational impact would help prove his
hypothesis. With the research that he
did, he hypothesized that even though the eclipse's corona is very bright, the
stars should still be seen around the moon due to gravitational force. Stars are always constant, so they should
always be seen in the same spot. If the
light of the stars are seen around the corona, then he'll know that the
position and light of the stars was moved and bent by gravity, therefore making
it a particle.
When he saw the
star's light around the moon he provided evidence to his point. The placement of stars is constant, and even
though the stars were blocked by the eclipse, the corona curved the light so it
could still be seen. His theory was
proven, because gravity shifted the light giving showing that it had properties
of a particle. That's also why they call
it Einstein gravity. The theory of
relativity as he called it is now one of his most famous experiments.
