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WHAT IS LIGHT, REALLY
We can push a car one mile, a wagon five feet, and a dime one inch, but we will hit a limit if we try to keep working in smaller and smaller measures. We call the least amount of work, a quantum of action. You probably thought the county road-crew discovered the least amount of work, but no, a man named Planck stumbled on the idea, an idea so strange that he didn't quite believe it himself. In spite of that, he found a constant for quantum mechanics as important as 186,000 is for the speed of light: .00000000000000000000000000663. (I'm leaving in all the zeros so you get some feel for the smallness.) The energy in one piece of light equals this constant times the frequency of the light which is still quite small. Did I say a piece of light? We'll get to that. Planck's formulas also produced the smallest time possible and the smallest mass possible. The smallest length possible is .00000000000000000000000000000002 of a centimeter. We'll use the smallest length possible to describe the quantum concept, since we can at least picture it. But let's enlarge the smallest length so we don't have to squint.
In our oversized, imaginary quantum-world, let's say the smallest length possible is one foot, and we build a rocket that can act like an electron (think negative thoughts). Now if we fire our rocket straight up, we will expect it to climb in a steady motion. However, in a quantum situation, the rocket will appear one foot off the ground, then two feet, three feet, and so on.
The rocket can never appear one-half foot off the ground or one and a half feet off the ground. We call going from one foot to two feet with no stops in between, a quantum leap. Planck's constant is very small, so we can still expect a real rocket to look as if it rises smoothly but not at the subatomic size of things.
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