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What would the person's avatar above you say?

Kirsten889

By Kirsten889
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It was Planck who, in 1900, first expressed the thought that light had atomic properties, and the theory put forward by Planck was later more exhaustively developed by Einstein. The conviction, arrived at by different paths, was that matter could not create or absorb light, other than in quantities of energy which represented the multiple of a specific unit of energy. This unit of energy received the name of light quantum or photon. The magnitude of the photon is different for different colours of light, but if the quantity of energy of a photon is divided by the frequency of oscillation of the ray of light, the same number is always obtained, the so-called Planck's constant h. This constant is thus of a universal nature and forms one of the foundation stones for modern atomic physics.

 

Since light too was thus divided into atoms it appeared that all phenomena could be explained as interactions between atoms of various kinds. Mass was also attributed to the atom of light, and the effects which were observed when light rays were incident upon matter could be explained with the help of the law for the impact of bodies.

 

Not many years passed before the found connection between the photon and the light ray led to an analogous connection between the motion of matter and the propagation of waves being sought for.

 

For a long time it had been known that the customary description of the propagation of light in the form of rays of light, which are diffracted and reflected on transmission from one medium to another, was only an approximation to the true circumstances, which only held good so long as the wavelength of the light was infinitesimally small compared with the dimensions of the body through which the light passed, and of the instruments with which it was observed. In reality light is propagated in the form of waves which spread out in all directions according to the laws for the propagation of waves.

 

Prince Louis de Broglie concieved the brilliant idea of seeking an analogy between the path of the light ray and the track of a material point. He wondered whether the track of a particle of matter, like the path of a ray of light, might only be an approximate expression for reality, prescribed by the coarseness of our senses, and whether one here was not also dealing with wave motion. Using Einstein's theory of relativity, he was equally successful in representing the motion of matter as a combination of waves which were propagating themselves with velocities greater than that of light. Matter is formed or represented by a great number of this kind of waves which have somewhat different velocities of propagation and such phase that they combine at the point in question. Such a system of waves forms a crest which propagates itself with quite a different velocity from that of its component waves, this velocity being the so-called group velocity. Such a wave crest represents a material point which is thus either formed by it or connected with it, and is called a wave packet. De Broglie now found that the velocity of the material point was in fact the group velocity of the matter-wave.

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