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In his 1905 paper on light quanta, [p 16] Einstein created the quantum theory of light. His proposal that light exists as tiny packets (photons) was so revolutionary, that even such major pioneers of quantum theory as Planck and Bohr refused to believe that it could be true.
Einstein was troubled by the fact that his theory seemed incomplete, since it did not determine the direction of a spontaneously emitted photon. A probabilistic nature of light-particle motion was first considered by Newton in his treatment of birefringence and, more generally, of the splitting of light beams at interfaces into a transmitted ...
That energy possessed by a single photon corresponds exactly to the transition between discrete energy levels in an atom (or other system) that emitted the photon; material absorption of a photon is the reverse process. Einstein's explanation of spontaneous emission also predicted the existence of stimulated emission, the principle upon which ...
During the 1930s there was great interest in the neutrino theory of light and Pascual Jordan, [4] Ralph Kronig, Max Born, and others worked on the theory. In 1938, Maurice Pryce [5] brought work on the composite photon theory to a halt. He showed that the conditions imposed by Bose–Einstein commutation relations for the composite photon and ...
The photon having non-zero linear momentum, one could imagine that it has a non-vanishing rest mass m 0, which is its mass at zero speed. However, we will now show that this is not the case: m 0 = 0. Since the photon propagates with the speed of light, special relativity is called for. The relativistic expressions for energy and momentum ...
It’s no secret, Albert Einstein was a bonafide genius, but even geniuses get it wrong sometimes.
Einstein's special theory is not the only theory that combines a form of light speed constancy with the relativity principle. A theory along the lines of that proposed by Heinrich Hertz (in 1890) [ 17 ] allows for light to be fully dragged by all objects, giving local c-constancy for all physical observers.
Einstein theorized that the energy in each quantum of light was equal to the frequency of light multiplied by a constant, later called the Planck constant. A photon above a threshold frequency has the required energy to eject a single electron, creating the observed effect. This was a step in the development of quantum mechanics.