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Talk:Photoelectric effect (view source)
Revision as of 22:34, October 24, 2008
, 22:34, October 24, 2008→Timeline: it was Planck who postulated that light was quantized
::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...
::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)
::--[[User:BRichtigen|BRichtigen]] 08:07, 24 October 2008 (EDT)
:::I am all in favor of crediting Einstein for what he actually did, but it was Planck who postulated that light was quantized, and Lenard who explained the photoelectric effect. This is conventional wisdom -- Planck and Lenard got Nobel prizes. Eg, Planck is credited for this:
::::In a paper published in 1900, he announced his derivation of the relationship: this was based on the revolutionary idea that the energy emitted by a resonator could only take on discrete values or quanta. The energy for a resonator of frequency v is hv where h is a universal constant, now called Planck's constant.[http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1918/planck-bio.html]
:::I also don't believe the photoelectric effect was the reason Einstein got the Nobel prize. Einstein was already famous for relativity, and the committee felt pressure to give him a prize, but a prize for relativity would have been controversial for various reasons. [[User:RSchlafly|RSchlafly]] 18:34, 24 October 2008 (EDT)