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Short Note On Light

1) Scientists have long debated whether light is a particle or wave, with Newton proposing a particle theory and others a wave theory. Neither fully explained light's properties. 2) In the 17th century, Huygens established light as a wave, but Newton thought it was particles due to sharp shadows. Maxwell later predicted electromagnetic waves including light. 3) Einstein revived the particle theory in the late 19th century, proposing that light is both a particle (photon) and a wave (of photons), resolving the debate through light's dual nature.

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Rishu Mann
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407 views3 pages

Short Note On Light

1) Scientists have long debated whether light is a particle or wave, with Newton proposing a particle theory and others a wave theory. Neither fully explained light's properties. 2) In the 17th century, Huygens established light as a wave, but Newton thought it was particles due to sharp shadows. Maxwell later predicted electromagnetic waves including light. 3) Einstein revived the particle theory in the late 19th century, proposing that light is both a particle (photon) and a wave (of photons), resolving the debate through light's dual nature.

Uploaded by

Rishu Mann
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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• Light

Just what is the true nature of light? Is it a wave or perhaps a flow of extremely
small particles? These questions have long puzzled scientists. Around 1700,
Newton concluded that light was a group of particles (corpuscular theory).
Around the same time, there were other scholars who thought that light might
instead be a wave (wave theory). The corpuscular theory, however, cannot
explain wave-like light phenomena such as diffraction and interference. On the
other hand, the wave theory cannot clarify why photons fly out of metal that is
exposed to light (the phenomenon is called the photoelectric effect, which was
discovered at the end of the 19th century). In this manner, the great physicists
have continued to debate and demonstrate the true nature of light over the
centuries.
Sir Isaac Newton (1643 to 1727) realized that light had frequency-like
properties when he used a prism to split sunlight into its component colors.
Nevertheless, he thought that light was a particle because the periphery of the
shadows it created was extremely sharp and clear.
In 1678, Dutch physicist Christian Huygens (1629 to 1695) established the
wave theory of light and announced the Huygens' principle.

Some 100 years after the time of Newton, French physicist Augustin-Jean
Fresnel (1788 to 1827) asserted that light waves have an extremely short
wavelength and mathematically proved light interference. At that point, the
particle theory of light fell out of favor and was replaced by the wave theory.

The next theory was provided by the brilliant Scottish physicist James Clerk
Maxwell (1831 to 1879). In 1864, he predicted the existence of
electromagnetic waves, the existence of which had not been confirmed before
that time, and out of his prediction came the concept of light being a wave, or
more specifically, a type of electromagnetic wave.

The theory of light being a particle completely vanished until the end of the
19th century when Albert Einstein revived it. Einstein believed light is a
particle (photon) and the flow of photons is a wave. The various properties of
light, which is a type of electromagnetic wave, are due to the behavior of
extremely small particles called photons that are invisible to the naked eye.
What Is a Photon?
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.
Photons have energy equal to their oscillation frequency times Planck's
constant. He was saying that light is a flow of photons, the energy of these
photons is the height of their oscillation frequency, and the intensity of the
light is the quantity of its photons.

Einstein proved his theory by proving that the Planck's constant he derived
based on his experiments on the photoelectric effect ( in which electrons fly
out of a metal surface exposed to light) exactly matched the constant
6.6260755 x 10-34 (Planck's constant) that German physicist Max Planck (1858
to 1947) obtained in 1900 through his research on electromagnetic waves. This
too pointed to an intimate relationship between the properties and oscillation
frequency of light as a wave and the properties and momentum (energy) of
light as a particle, or in other words, the dual nature of light as both a particle
and a wave.

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