Comparing The Double Slit Experiment And The History Of Light

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The Double Slit Experiment and the History of Light In the early part of the 19th century the scientific community was in the midst of a debate regarding the nature of light, specifically whether it was a particle or a wave. Isaac Newton argued that light behaved like a particle whilst a man by the name of Christian Huygens argued that light was in fact a wave. Unfortunately as Newton was the president of the Royal Society at the time and many other scientists would simply take what he said to be the truth, this meant that few scientists of the era actually considered his proposal. Despite this Huygens still attempted to prove that light was in fact a wave. To do this he had to show that the points argued by Newton were either moot or incorrect.…show more content…
The electrons emitted from the photoelectric effect have a kinetic energy which can be measured, it was found that this kinetic energy is not reliant on the intensity of the light but instead is a linear relationship with the frequency of the light. In fact, if the frequency of the light is too low no electrons at will be emitted at all. So as the intensity of a light source used to induce the photoelectric effect is increased the amount of electrons emitted with the same kinetic energy also increases rather than the same number with higher energies (this is assuming the light source has a high enough frequency to induce the photoelectric effect). Einstein deduced from these observations that light itself must be quantised and that the energy of light is not transmitted as it is with a tradition wave but instead via small “packets” of energy. These energy “packets” would later come to be known as photons and their size was found to be same as Planck’s constant and thanks to the linear relation between frequency and the kinetic energy of the electrons the equation E=hvcan be used to determine the energy of the photons, where ‘E’ is the energy, ‘h’ is Planck's constant (6.626 x 10^-34 J*s) and ‘v’ is the frequency of the light
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  • Comparing The Double Slit Experiment And The History Of Light

    1084 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Double Slit Experiment and the History of Light In the early part of the 19th century the scientific community was in the midst of a debate regarding the nature of light, specifically whether it was a particle or a wave. Isaac Newton argued that light behaved like a particle whilst a man by the name of Christian Huygens argued that light was in fact a wave. Unfortunately as Newton was the president of the Royal Society at the time and many other scientists would simply take what he said to be

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