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May 8, 2014 · Have you ever noticed that time flies when you're having fun? Well, not for light. In fact, photons don't experience any time at all. Here's a mind-bending concept that should...
- The First Model for Capturing and Condensing Light Under Realistic Conditions
Publishing in Physical Review A, a PhD student at EPFL has...
- Can Light Orbit a Black Hole
And only light, moving at, well, light speed, can actually...
- Light Speed
Do constants of nature—the numbers that determine how things...
- Photons
A group of South Korean researchers has successfully...
- The First Model for Capturing and Condensing Light Under Realistic Conditions
- 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...
Jul 16, 2020 · Light travels through space and its speed is independent of space itself so, for instance, as it passes near a star or blackhole and space is warped, it doesn't slow down or speed up, though...
By observing light from faraway cosmic objects, the Hubble Space Telescope is like a time machine. Light takes time to reach Hubble, because it travels great distances. That means images captured by Hubble today, show what the objects looked like years ago!
Jan 23, 2024 · How does light slow down? Yes, the speed of light is always a constant. But it slows down whenever it travels through a medium like air or water. How does this work?
Oct 29, 2024 · Light travels from the moon to our eyes in about 1 second, which means the moon is about 1 light-second away. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach our eyes, so the sun is about 8 light...
Apr 24, 2017 · Light travels slower in a medium than it does in a vacuum, and the speed is proportional to the density of the medium. This speed variation causes light to bend at the interface of two media — a phenomenon called refraction.
