Wave Particle Duality In Light

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Wave Particle Duality in Light In the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton proposed competing theories for light's behavior. Huygens proposed a wave theory of light while Newton's was a "corpuscular" (particle) theory of light. Huygens' theory had some issues in matching observation. Newton's prestige helped lend support to his theory, so for over a century his theory was dominant. In the early nineteenth century, complications arose for the corpuscular theory of light. Diffraction had been observed, for one thing, which it had trouble adequately explaining. Thomas Young's double slit experiment resulted in obvious wave behavior and seemed to firmly support the wave theory of light over Newton's particle theory. A wave generally has to propagate through a medium of some kind. The medium proposed by Huygens had been luminiferous aether (or in more common modern terminology, ether). When James Clerk Maxwell quantified a set of equations (called Maxwell's laws or Maxwell's equations) to explain electromagnetic radiation (including visible light) as the propagation of waves, he assumed just such an ether as the medium of propagation, and his predictions were consistent with experimental results. The problem with the wave theory was that no such ether had ever been found. Not only that, but astronomical observations in stellar aberration by James Bradley in 1720 had indicated that ether would have to be stationary relative to a moving Earth. Throughout the 1800s, attempts were made to detect the ether or its movement directly, culminating in the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. They all failed to actually detect the ether, resulting in a huge debate as the twentieth century began. Was light a wave or a particle? In 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper to explain the photoelectric effect, which proposed that light traveled as discrete bundles of

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