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- Scientists call a particle of light a photon because it can carry and pass on energy like matter can, but it also sometimes acts like a wave, as light should. Since a photon is a particle that has very unique abilities that normal matter does not have, we can say that light is not matter.
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17 hours ago · According to Sapienza, this isn't the right question to be asking. "Light is not sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave," he said. "It is always both a wave and a particle. It's just that we ...
May 24, 2024 · We know that light is a wave based on how it behaves – it exhibits the same properties of other waves we have examined – it interferes with itself, it follows an inverse-square law for intensity (brightness), and so on.
Currently light is thought of both as a wave and being made up of particles (photons), because as Robert mentioned in his answer, certain phenomena require modelling light as a wave to explain (interference, diffraction etc.), and others require photons (such as the photo-electric effect).
- Two Worlds
- Light Is A Wave … and A Particle
- Matter Is A Wave … and A Particle
At first glance (and even at deeper glances), waves and particles are very different. A particle is, as best as I can put it, a thing. It's a small, single, finite object. You can hold a particle in your hand. You can throw a particle at someone else and watch it bounce off of them. It's localized. You can point to a particle and say, "Look, the pa...
The problems with this approach started with light itself. In the early 1800s, the English scientist Thomas Young played some games with light by shining some beams through two narrow openings onto a screen behind them. What he found was a classic interference pattern with stripes of varying intensity on the screen. This is exactly what water waves...
In the 1920s, a young physicist named Louis de Broglie made a radical suggestion: Since light has energy, momentum and a wavelength, and matterhas energy and momentum, maybe matter has a wavelength, too. That's something that's easy to say but hard to wrap your head around. What does it mean for matter to have a wavelength? Or was de Broglie just h...
If light is a particle, then why does it refract when travelling from one medium to another? And if light is a wave, then why does it dislodge electrons ? But all behavior of light can be explained by combining the two models: light behaves like particles and light behaves like waves.
Dec 15, 2022 · Key Takeaways. Quantum physics has redefined our understanding of matter. In the 1920s, the wave-particle duality of light was extended to include all material objects, from electrons to you....
The excited electrons in a gas emit a discrete spectrum. The wavelength of a light wave is inversely proportional to its frequency. Light is often described by it's wavelength in a vacuum. Light ranges in wavelength from 400 nm on the violet end to 700 nm on the red end of the visible spectrum.