The debate about the properties of light date back to the time of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who first undertook to comprehend its properties through experimentation. His belief was that light was composed of particles, and, being Newton, his view was accepted unquestionably by most of the scientific community. However, his contemporary, Francesco Grimaldi (1618-1663) performed an experiment where he noted for the first time the phenomena of diffraction, or the light bending around an obstacle, which would suggest light was a propagating wave. Eventually, the wave theory became widely accepted, but with the advent of quantum mechanics, light again appeared to have particle properties. Scaling down our analogies to subatomic scale to understand the phenomena discovered in that realm doesn't always work -- although difficult for us to comprehend at our human-sized scale of existence, light is considered to be both wave and particle, electromagnetic energy moving at an unvarying speed.
Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, I. Asimov, pg. 100, 1964.
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