If you’ve read or heard anything about quantum mechanics, you’ve heard the phrase “particle-wave duality.” The common wisdom is that this means that particles sometimes behave like waves and sometimes behave like particles. And although this is right, it’s a bit misleading. The truth is: Everything is always a wave. It’s just that waves can be made to behave like particles. To see what I mean, let’s actually show how one can make a set of waves behave like a particle. Specifically, let’s show how a set of light waves can be made to behave like a photon, a light particle.