Davies & Gribbin (1992: 206-7):
As if this were not bewildering enough, a further twist was added by John Wheeler, of the University of Texas at Austin. He pointed out that the holistic nature of reality extends not just through space but through time as well. Wheeler showed how a decision as to which of the two complementary aspects of reality — wave or particle — shall be revealed by the two different double-slit experiments can be left until after the photon (or electron) has already passed through the double-slit system. It is possible to "look back" from the position of the image screen to find out which slit any given particle has come through. Alternatively, one could choose not to look, and leave the interference pattern to develop as usual. The decision of the experimenter about whether or not to look back at the time the particles arrive at the screen determines whether or not the light was behaving in the manner of particles or waves at an earlier moment, at the time when it passed through the slit system in the first screen. Wheeler called his arrangement the "delayed-choice" experiment.
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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, light does not behave "in the manner of particles or waves". Instead, particles are instances of the potential that is quantified as a wave of probability. Thus, only particles pass through the slits. Experiments that are said to reveal the wave nature of light are typically those that involve the overlapping of probability waves, such that the distribution of particle trajectories instantiates those overlapping probabilities.
From the same perspective, the time of observation is the time of construing experience as a particular instance of a probability wave. In this 'immanent' view, meanings such as particle and wave are construed in semiotic systems, and do not transcend them.
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