Your friend claims the light is a wave. What experimental evidence could you cite to demonstrate...

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Your friend claims the light is a wave. What experimental evidence could you cite to demonstrate that light behaves like a particle?

The Nature of Light:

Whether light is a wave or a particle has been debated by scientists for several centuries. At the turn of the 19th century, certain assumptions about light led to the "ultraviolet catastrophe" -- a nonsensical prediction of classical physics that a blackbody would emit infinite ultraviolet energy for small wavelengths. The solution to this problem resulted from considering light as a series of packets called quanta. That is, light of a given frequency can not be infinitely divided, but has a fundamental discrete value that can not be subdivided further. In other words, light can behave as a particle.

Answer and Explanation: 1

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The experiment that you can site to show that light behaves as a stream of particles is the photoelectric effect experiment.

In Einstein's...

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The Photoelectric Effect: Physics Lab

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Chapter 16 / Lesson 5
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Einstein's photoelectric effect experiment showed that light can act as a particle. Follow along with the experiment in this lab and analyze the data collected to understand the photoelectric effect.


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