Search results
Today, his paper from March, 1905 on why light is a particle. Einstein didn't just pull this idea out of thin air. He first noted that the light emitted from something hot, like a light bulb filament, actually has the same energy distribution as a gas, which is somewhat surprising if you're a 19th century physicist who thinks that light is a ...
- Basic concepts and methods
Einstein showed that these results can be explained by two...
- Basic concepts and methods
Mar 12, 2024 · Although Einstein was interpreting different observations, this is the conclusion he reached in his 1905 paper: that the pure wave theory of light is an oversimplification, and that the energy of a beam of light comes in finite chunks rather than being spread smoothly throughout a region of space.
Einstein resolved this problem using Planck’s revolutionary idea that light was a particle. The energy carried by each particle of light (called quanta or photon) is dependent on the light’s frequency (ν) as shown: E = hν. Where h = Planck’s constant = 6.6261 × 10-34 Js.
- 17 min
Jan 19, 2023 · One of the first experiments which is exhibited strong experimental evidence of light behaving like a particle was the photoelectric effect, which first led Albert Einstein to develop the particle model of light. In the photoelectric effect, a beam of incoming light shines on a metallic surface.
Dec 10, 2023 · Describe the photoelectric effect with Einstein's quantized photon model of light; Nature, it seemed, was quantized (non-continuous, or discrete). If this was so, how could Maxwell’s equations correctly predict the result of the blackbody radiator?
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.
Nov 7, 2024 · Einstein showed that these results can be explained by two assumptions: (1) that light is composed of corpuscles or photons, the energy of which is given by Planck’s relationship, and (2) that an atom in the metal can absorb either a whole photon or nothing.