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20 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 ...
Light does not carry any charge itself, so it does not attract or repel charged particles like electrons. Instead light is an oscillating electric and magnetic field. If you take an electron and put it in a static electric field (e.g. around a Van de Graaff Generator) then the electron feels a force due to the field and will move.
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.
- The Double-Slit Experiment
- Particles and Waves
- Has Light Been Seen as Both?
Physicists debated for years whether light was a particle or wave. Isaac Newtonhad argued that light was composed of particles, yet other prominent scientists at the time argued that light was a wave. In 1801, physicist Thomas Young performed the double-slit experiment to determine whether or not light was a particle or wave. The double-slit experi...
Although most scientists had concluded that light was a wave and not a particle after the double-slit experiment, the story was not yet over. In the early 20th century, our understanding of the universe experienced one of its largest shifts in history due to the discovery of quantum mechanics. An entirely new area of physics opened up, and new theo...
The wave-particle duality of light is one of the strangest things about our universe. Although light has been seen as both particle and wave, it has never been seen as both at the same time. Every experiment devised to try and see both has resulted in one or the other. No matter how hard scientists try, light will simply change its behaviour from w...
Dec 28, 2020 · In plain terms, electromagnetic waves are simply what we know as light. Unlike most waves, however, electromagnetic waves do not require a medium through which to propagate. Photons or electromagnetic radiation exhibit what is called particle-wave duality.
Published: October 25, 2021 at 10:00 am. Is light a wave or a particle? Neither: light is its own unique phenomenon – the outcome of an interaction between electrical and magnetic fields – and it behaves like both waves and particles. Most of us were taught at school that light is a wave. This is because it does things that waves do.
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Is light a wave or a particle?
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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.
