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The nature of light puzzled some of humanity’s greatest thinkers for 2,000 years, behaving like a wave in certain conditions and as a particle in others.
- Polarised Light
What is polarisation and why is it in my sunglasses?
- Is It Possible to Trap Light
Scientists have developed various techniques for capturing...
- Polarised Light
At first, physicists were reluctant to accept the dual nature of light. After all, many of us humans like to have one right answer. But Einstein paved the way in 1905 by embracing wave-particle duality. We've already discussed the photoelectric effect, which led Einstein to describe light as a photon.
THE DUAL NATURE OF LIGHT 45 As is well known, Einstein did not get the Nobel Prize for his relativity theories due to strong disbelief in those theories among some influential members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The earlier-mentioned Alvar Gullstand was of the opinion that the correctness of Einstein's special relativity theory ...
In 1905, nearly a decade after this first "thought experiment," Einstein answered these questions with his Special Theory of Relativity. The theory, which revolutionized our understanding of time and space, is based on Einstein's astonishing recognition that light always travels at a constant speed, regardless of how fast you're moving when you measure it.
- The Nobel Prizes For X-Rays
- Evidence For The Particle Nature of Light
- The Nobel Prize For Physics to Max Planck
- The 1921 Nobel Prize to Albert Einstein
- The Nobel Prize to Arthur Holly Compton
- Prizes For The Discoveries of The Dual Nature of Matter
- Nobel Prize For Theories Solving The Duality Problem of Light
- The Wave-Particle Duality in One and The Same Experiment
- Postcript
The discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgenin 1895 was honoured by the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Röntgen had shown among many other things that X-rays like light, were propagating in straight lines but in contrast to light very penetrating through matter. Röntgen foresaw the importance to medical science of his discovery. This dis...
In physics textbooks two phenomena are usually quoted demonstrating the particle nature of light: 1) the photoelectric effect and 2) the Compton scattering of X-rays. In some not so critical texts a third circumstance is erronously quoted, namely Planck‘s discovery of energy quanta, which he did in his analysis of heat radiation. The Nobel Committe...
Planck’s discovery of what is called Planck’s constant , was emphasized as motivation for his prize in 1918. This new constant of nature (with the dimension of energy multiplied by time) connects the quantum of energy with the frequency of light, , through the formula . In the presentation at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1918 it was said , “The prod...
Albert Einstein in 1905 drew the conclusion that light sometimes behaves as particles through an ingenious statistical analysis of Wien‘s formula for the wave length distribution of heat radiation. Einstein saw that his new idea would provide a natural explanation of the photoelectric effect, i.e. the emission of electrons from metal surfaces illum...
Early in 1923 Arnold Sommerfeld visited the USA and wrote to Bohr: “The most interesting thing ..is the work of Compton in St Louis…. After it the wave theory of X-rays will become invalid.” Compton had followed up an observation that some parts of X-rays were scattered away from the beam direction with a longer wave length than the incoming radiat...
The dual nature of light has been extended to a similar duality in matter as well. Electrons and atoms were originally considered as corpuscles. In 1929 Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for “his discovery of the wave nature of electrons”. Experimental proofs were given by Clinton Joseph Davisson, New York, and ...
With the advent of quantum mechanics in 1925-1926 the possibility opened for a solution to the duality problem. Paul Dirac published in 1927 a mathematical theory for the interaction between electromagnetic fields, such as light or X-rays, and charged particles with both aspects of light inbedded – it was a theory of quantised fields. Further contr...
Experiments with beams of light or of electrons have been made such that both aspects – waves and particles – are observed. For interference to occur it is among other things also necessary for the beam to have available more than one path from source to detector (e.g. a screen). Interference is explained by the wave picture. When the beam intensit...
The photon is the field quantum (particle) acting as the communicator of force between charged particles. It has successfully been imbedded in a larger context together with the three communicators of the weak force – (W+, W– Z0). The latter three are very heavy particles, whereas the photon is massless. Together they are the communicators of the f...
Aug 11, 2021 · De Broglie put forward the idea that light exhibits wave-like properties such as frequency and wavelength, and dual nature is not a special case but the fundamental nature of light energy.
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Aug 24, 2010 · This dual nature of light, corpuscular and wavy, was like nothing else anyone had seen. When, in 1924, Louis de Broglie suggested that this dual nature was not restricted to light but was a ...
