>>14138784A wave is a mathematical model for describing, quantitatively and qualitatively, to varying degrees of accuracy and success, the objects and processes we see in the real world.
A dog is a dog. However, we can look at a dog and see that it shares lots of physical properties with other objects in the world. Eventually we recognize that this thread of commonality can be described by a closer inspection of what the dog - and all matter we see around us - is made of -- mostly, things that we call protons, neutrons, and electrons.
We have models to understand how these things behave. These models are remarkably accurate when the objects are isolated, and they are formulated in mathematics that is similar (but not identical) to the mathematics used to model things like water and acoustic waves. Hence, through this shared commonality we describe them all as types of waves, though of course they model very, very different elements of reality.
Anyway, getting back to the electrons etc. Our models of them also seem to hold well when we allow collections of them to interact with each other. Unfortunately we can only verify this validity up to fairly small numbers. Beyond a certain size, the calculation becomes either computationally intractable, or requires relaxing to an approximate model that is no longer sufficiently accurate.
We have no reason to expect that our models break down at dog-sizes, but at the same time the computational intractability makes those models essentially irrelevant at such scales in the first place. So, is a dog just one big wave? No, a dog is a dog. Just like an electron is an electron, nothing more. But perhaps a dog can be modeled by mathematics describing a "big wave" (again, a very particular and specific type of wave). But I think it's not a very meaningful question because those models will never be able gain even a sliver of predictive power when applied to the dog. That's why we have other models of dogs, namely biological models.
