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Talk:Photoelectric effect (view source)
Revision as of 12:07, October 24, 2008
, 12:07, October 24, 2008→Timeline
: It was Planck who said that light was quantized, with E = hf. It is Planck's constant, after all. And that was before Einstein's paper. I think that it is more accurate to call it Planck's quantum theory of light. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 17:51, 23 October 2008 (EDT)
: It was Planck who said that light was quantized, with E = hf. It is Planck's constant, after all. And that was before Einstein's paper. I think that it is more accurate to call it Planck's quantum theory of light. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 17:51, 23 October 2008 (EDT)
::Well, Planck spoke of "Einstein's Korpuskulartheorie des Lichtes" - the
Einsteinian corpuscular theory of light...
::In 1900, Planck initiated the quantum physics (''Quantenphysik'') with his
speech ''Zur Theorie des Gesetzes der Energieverteilung im Normalspektrum''
(''About the Theory of a Law of the Distribution of Energy in the Normal
spectrum''). Here, he thought of the material as oscillators which could
send out energy only in special quanta. This is thought as a property of
the material, not of the electromagnetic waves which were produced.
Especially, he didn't state that ''light'' was quantized - the opposite is
true. Einstein was the first to undertake the step to think of the waves as
quantized in 1905 (''Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes
betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt'' - ''About an Heuristic Aspect
Regarding the Generation and Transmutation of Light''). And while Planck's
view in 1900 was radical new, ''this'' was also radical new, but different.
And that's why Planck took quite a while to accept this new aspect.
::Dear RSchlafly, I looked at your contributions to the articles regarding
A. Einstein: you seem to be very critical toward Einstein's contributions to
modern physics. But here, you should go with Max Planck and accept that it
was Einstein's idea of a quantum theory of light - which gained him the
Nobel prize rightly, I'd say.
::Nowadays, it seems so natural for us to think of light as quantized that
we often fail to see how difficult - and counter-intuitional - this idea was
at the beginning of the 20th century: it had taken so long to think of light
as waves after the bitter Newton/Huygens controversy...
--[[User:BRichtigen|BRichtigen]] 08:07, 24 October 2008 (EDT)