Everything acts like a wave. The term to Google for is "de broglie wavelength". Even you have an effective wavelength and you refract (slightly) when passing through a slit (door)
It explains some things pretty intuitively (double slit experiment), but from what I can tell it becomes too convoluted for other things.
Mass can be related to energy with E=mc^2, and you can get some idea of its relation to wavelength and wave collisions.
I think a smallest wavelength is unlikely, because it would put an upper bound on energy. The only side-effect of increasing the energy density (ie a lot of energy in a small space, like a very low-wavelength photon) is the formation of a black hole. I think the question of whether photons (massless) can form them is one of those quantum-gravity issues that are awaiting a theory.
I don't understand much of anything, but based on what I read, I strongly prefer the idea that everything is a field and particles don't exist, rather than vice versa. It just feels right. We don't experience particles any more than waves in our daily lives anyway.
You experience the properties of particles a little more directly...mostly in solution.
It's easy to see why pilot wave is appealing...maybe, secretly, things are actually not crazy or incomprehensible at small scales and the universe makes sense!
But even ignoring QM and looking out at the 13 billion light years of space above should make one ponder what right we had to get even this far
There is also a divorcing of pilot wave from these particular visualizations - the emergent properties of fluids will always make them bad approximations. But the maths don't work out either, and it ends up getting too convoluted compared to the 'simpler' and weirder version.
However, I think it's an interesting alternative that demonstrates why, at some level, you just kind of have to throw your hands up and say "well I guess that's just how reality works, dammit."
There are less-crazy visions about how very small things work, but they don't do the job.
However, we do understand that things can be two things at once. Say I take an metal marble that has been painted blue. We have an object with two distinct properties. Now we can say that the marble is metal, and we can test it is by feeling it or using a magnet. And we can say that it's blue, and we can test that it's blue by shining a light on it and measuring the light that comes off of it. But our marble doesn't stop being blue just because we're using a magnet, and it doesn't stop being metal just because we're shining a light on it. However, we can't tell that it's blue by using a magnet, and we can't shine a light to tell if it's metal. Indeed, we can even think of more properties. A marble is spherical, but we could also have a blue metal cube.
The universe isn't tricking us or making something switch between two states of being. Our tests are just limited. When we get to a subatomic level, our tests and interactions are so limited that you can't test for more than one property at a time because every test interferes with what we're testing. You have to pick the one you want to look at. That's where the uncertainly principle comes in.
As far as I'm aware, the reason that we can't develop any test that can break the uncertainty principle is because everything we could potentially test with is, itself, a part of the wave-particle system. Since experimentation requires measurement (of course), and every measurement requires interaction (it does), and every interaction in the universe is either wave-like or particle-like and it's never both (they are, AFAIK), then no matter how smart we build our system we can't measure for both at once because everything we can build is inherently limited to this restriction because everything is in this system.
It's like baking a cake. Say you want to know two things: Is the oven temperature right, and is the cake completely cooked through? If you want to know if the cake is cooked, you'll have to open the oven and stick a tester into the cake. But, if you open the oven, you've let all the heat out. You can't do both at the same time, because one test interferes with the other. Even if you check the temperature and then test the cake, you've still changed the system. This is not a perfect analogy, of course, but it kind of gets you thinking along the right lines.
I'm no expert in this field, however, and I'm sure someone will be along to correct my misconceptions.
I think the 'starting point' of the double slit experiment in explaining quantum physics to be a bit of a problem for me. It is grounded in real-world analogies and it seems more an example only used to break people from trying to ground quantum physics in macro analogies. Since it is grounded that way, I've found the discussion is always around the mechanics of it. Feynman's lecture on it is an example of just the kind of rabbit hole this discussion goes down trying to explain this. "If you put a microscope at the junction, it does...". "If you do .... it does this".
I'd start any discussion with, "Ok, the model you were told in HS is wrong. Forget particles, there are no little 'bowling balls' with a skin and an interior. Those were useful for a time, but they are no longer. To be clear, an electron is only something we have found through experiment to have these properties "
Then bring up the dual slit. Spin, the exclusion principle, etc. The goal is to not enter into a debate about the 'dual slit' and just give the facts of what we see, then start coming up with explanations.
I found this quora answer helpful in modeling the type of answer that I see to always have wanted myself, https://qr.ae/TUfBFN
As to life "in the system", wave functions certainly do appear to collapse in experiments limited to drab reality. Below are links to a couple Nature papers (freely available pdfs) from the past few years which you might find interesting.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep12518
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0270
Editing to add that it would seem we actually can disprove realism (ie the particle view) for certain awkwardly medium sized systems which behave in ways that can only be consistent with a QM based interpretation. And apparently also achieve interaction-free measurement by setting up a system where we measure later in order to make inferences about what must have happened earlier. Or possibly I've completely misunderstood this paper, not being a quantum physicist myself.
That's basically what you have to do. You've got to let go of your need to know what quantum particles "are", because the universe isn't going to show it to you. All you can really do is mathematically describe and predict behavior. That's a lot, but it's still limited.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
> You've got to let go of your need to know what quantum particles "are", because the universe isn't going to show it to you.
I'd argue that it does show it to us, and quite clearly. It's just that us big macroscopic beings are sometimes confused or dissatisfied with how different and unintuitive (for us) things are at that scale.
> All you can really do is mathematically describe and predict behavior. That's a lot, but it's still limited.
Of course it's always important to be actively aware that there could be more going on under the surface that we haven't yet come across evidence for. But if your model fits reality perfectly, who's to say that it's not how things really work? By definition you could never prove it one way or the other.