If you are thinking that I was inspired by this experiment to keep ‘Double Slit’ as the title of this site, then you are right. I came across this experiment when I was reading about ‘photons’. And I kinda like it.
This experiment is with light. This experiment proved the photoelectric which was introduced after the observations seen in the experiment.
Date goes back to the 17th century. Issac Newton and Robert Hooke were on a project with light. In that project, Newton had a opinion that light is made of particles but Hooke was against and said light is a wave. Further studies resulted in saying that light is a wave.
Later, in the 19th century; Thomas Young, a renowned physicist from England, was spending some time by the lake. He observed the pattern formed by the ripples in the water when it was passing through two gaps between the stones. It reminded him the day when he experimented with laser light passing from two slits. It behaved just the same how the water behaved. He was then satisfied, to say light is a wave, as he knew that ripples were waves. The image he could see with light was like this:
Then he wanted to start studying deeply into it, so he experimented again, but in a enhanced manner. He kept the structure same, placed a black cloth over the structure so that no external light can pass through. This would give him a better view of what is happening. This time he could see the results in a different way, not the way how a wave does, but in a way how particles do! Like this:
This puzzled the physicists all over the world. Albert Einstein took interest into this topic. After a long research on the topic, he came up with an idea that light could possibly be both, a wave and a particle. He named this phenomenon as the Photoelectric Effect. Further researches stated that this effect was true and was proved in the ‘Falsification’ test. Later, for his contribution of the photoelectric effect, he was rewarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Now it was clear that light was made up of particles. He called these particles as ‘Quanta’ while others called it in a simpler way ‘Photons’.
If you want to try this experiment, you will need a laser light (for the best result, because other sources of light might cause distortion and the results would not be clear), two sticks, a reflecting surface like glass, a really powerful camera to detect really small amount of light and a black cloth.
One scenario which proved the Photoelectric Effect was when a part of light which was passing through two wires with their ends open perpendicularly, jumped from one tip of the wire to the other tip, while the other part of the light was just passing through. It was not possible for a wave to ‘jump’ over. The only possible way could be if light was made of particles. After the photoelectric effect was proved, this scenario told us that light is made of both a wave and a particle. Here the part made of particles jumped over the wires, and the part made of wavelengths just went through.
This theory told us a story that not always a theory proven can be perfectly correct. Some part of it can be partly or completely false. But not all theories are like this….. [we can trust the scientists and physicists though <;]
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