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- Light acts as a wave and can be described by a wavelength λ and a frequency ν. One property of waves is that their speed is equal to their wavelength times their frequency. That means we have speed = λν s p e e d = λ ν
19 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 Waves - BBC Bitesize. What are light waves? Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by the eye. It travels as a transverse wave. Unlike a sound waves,...
Jan 16, 2013 · In an approximate way, light is both a particle and a wave. But in an exact representation, light is neither a particle nor a wave, but is something more complex. As a metaphor, consider a cylindrical can of beans.
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Imagining light as a ray makes it easy to describe, with great accuracy, three well-known phenomena: reflection, refraction and scattering. Let's take a second to discuss each one.
Of course, we live in an imperfect world and not all surfaces are smooth. When light strikes a rough surface, incoming light rays reflect at all sorts of angles because the surface is uneven. This scattering occurs in many of the objects we encounter every day. The surface of paper is a good example. You can see just how rough it is if you peer at ...
Refraction occurs when a ray of light passes from one transparent medium (air, let's say) to a second transparent medium (water). When this happens, light changes speed and the light ray bends, either toward or away from what we call the normal line, an imaginary straight line that runs perpendicular to the surface of the object. The amount of bend...
Lenses, like those in a telescope or in a pair of glasses, take advantage of refraction. A lens is a piece of glass or other transparent substance with curved sides for concentrating or dispersing light rays. Lenses serve to refract light at each boundary. As a ray of light enters the transparent material, it is refracted. As the same ray exits, it...
Unfortunately, a ray theory can't explain all of the behaviors exhibited by light. We'll need a few other explanations, like the one we'll cover next.
Einstein had a great explanation for this peculiar observation. He hypothesised light is made of particles, and is in fact not a wave. He then linked the intensity of light to the number of...
Dec 7, 2022 · Waves of Light. Light has the properties of waves. Like ocean waves, light waves have crests and troughs. The distance between one crest and the next, which is the same as the distance between one trough and the next, is called the wavelength.
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The light particle conceived by Einstein is called a photon. The main point of his light quantum theory is the idea that light's energy is related to its oscillation frequency (known as frequency in the case of radio waves). Oscillation frequency is equal to the speed of light divided by its wavelength.
