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In the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton had advocated that light was corpuscular (particulate), but Christiaan Huygens took an opposing wave description. While Newton had favored a particle approach, he was the first to attempt to reconcile both wave and particle theories of light, and the only one in his time to consider both, thereby anticipating modern wave-particle duality.
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (/ h ɜːr t s /, HURTS; German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç hɛʁts]; [1] [2] 22 February 1857 – 1 January 1894) was a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.
Photons are massless particles that can move no faster than the speed of light measured in vacuum. The photon belongs to the class of boson particles. As with other elementary particles, photons are best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave–particle duality, their behavior featuring properties of both waves and particles. [2]
For the remainder of the photon epoch, the universe contained a hot dense plasma of nuclei, electrons and photons. [2] At the start of this period, many photons had sufficient energy to photodissociate deuterium, so those atomic nuclei that formed were quickly separated back into protons and neutrons. By the ten second mark, ever fewer high ...
Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum chemistry dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons.
This discovery of the wave–particle duality of matter and energy is fundamental to the later development of quantum field theory. 1909 and 1916 – Einstein shows that, if Planck's law of black-body radiation is accepted, the energy quanta must also carry momentum p = h / λ , making them full-fledged particles .
Explaining his results by interference of the waves emanating from the two different slits, he deduced that light must propagate as waves. Augustin-Jean Fresnel did more definitive studies and calculations of diffraction, published in 1815 and 1818, and thereby gave great support to the wave theory of light that had been advanced by Christiaan ...
The discovery (by chance in 1965) of the cosmic background radiation suggests that the early universe was dominated by a radiation field, a field of extremely high temperature and pressure. [ 4 ] There is background radiation observed across all wavelength regimes, peaking in microwave , but also notable in infrared and X-ray regimes.