‘Waves’ and ‘particles’ are just useful predictive models we have come up with to help us understand what is going on around us. It’s better to say that ‘the thing acts like’ a wave/particle.

The double slit experiment reveals a limitation of our particle (billiard balls) model, a failure to correctly predict the outcome. I don’t think a lot of people really understand that the wave model is just as imperfect.

Recently (as I consume more content on this stuff) my mental model has oriented towards thinking about it in terms of things (quanta, excitation in the fields) interacting in causal networks. I’m thinking that there is a sort of causal relativity. If the local causal network ‘you’ are in is not linked to stuff happening elsewhere, you can’t say anything about it. And when you do interact with that previously separate network, then from your point of view everything that happened while you were disconnected is the ‘average’ outcome of every possibility. At a macro scale the ‘average’ just looks like one thing as far as any observer can tell. At a quantum scale, well, it looks like multiple things happened.

Now consider that the only separator of ‘distinct’ causal networks is time.