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15 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 ...
Apr 24, 2017 · Light always takes the shortest path between a source and destination. A line drawn from the source to the destination, perpendicular to the wave-fronts, is called a ray. Far from the source, spherical wave fronts degenerate into a series of parallel lines moving in the direction of the ray.
Jul 5, 2024 · Stars, galaxies, dust clouds, exoplanets: all of these emit or reflect or absorb light, creating signals that travel across space for incredible distances to be detected here on Earth.
- Theory of Light to The 19th Century
- Double-Slit Experiment
- Electromagnetism and Special Relativity
- Einstein and The Photon
- Wave-Particle Duality
During the Scientific Revolution, scientists began moving away from Aristotelian scientific theories that had been seen as accepted canon for centuries. This included rejecting Aristotle’s theory of light, which viewed it as being a disturbance in the air (one of his four “elements” that composed matter), and embracing the more mechanistic view tha...
By the early 19th century, scientists began to break with corpuscular theory. This was due in part to the fact that corpuscular theory failed to adequately explain the diffraction, interference and polarization of light, but was also because of various experiments that seemed to confirm the still-competing view that light behaved as a wave. The mos...
Prior to the 19th and 20th centuries, the speed of light had already been determined. The first recorded measurements were performed by Danish astronomer Ole Rømer, who demonstrated in 1676 using light measurements from Jupiter’s moon Io to show that light travels at a finite speed (rather than instantaneously). By the late 19th century, James Cler...
In 1905, Einstein also helped to resolve a great deal of confusion surrounding the behavior of electromagnetic radiation when he proposed that electrons are emitted from atoms when they absorb energy from light. Known as the photoelectric effect, Einstein based his idea on Planck’s earlier work with “black bodies” – materials that absorb electromag...
Subsequent theories on the behavior of light would further refine this idea, which included French physicist Louis-Victor de Broglie calculating the wavelength at which light functioned. This was followed by Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” (which stated that measuring the position of a photon accurately would disturb measurements of it momentu...
Around the same time, there were other scholars who thought that light might instead be a wave (wave theory). Light travels in a straight line, and therefore it was only natural for Newton to think of it as extremely small particles that are emitted by a light source and reflected by objects.
Mar 15, 2024 · Light travels through the vacuum of space at 186,828 miles per second as transverse waves, outside of any material or medium, because photons—the particles that make up light—also behave as waves. This is referred to as the wave-particle duality of light.
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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.
