Light particle vs light wave theory(wasnt sure where to put this)

Feb 1, 2023
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After watching the behavior of light, I believe that it is the combination of a subatomic particle, I'm guessing roughly 1/3 the size of an electron and somewhere between 2x to 4x as fast, as for evedince for my theory, except for very sensitive machines that aren't available to the public we have issues finding electrons much less something smaller, and the laws of energy state that energy can not be created or destroyed, so I asked myself, on a subatomic scale how does solar panels work, and the energy comes from the light, but if light was a particle then it wouldn't be possible for matter to be changed to energy with out some sort of chemical change, but if light was just a wave, it would need a medium to travel through, as I began to ponder this, I knew it was truly impossible for a wave and it's medium to be the same thing, however if light was the byproduct of both an unknown particle and a wave working together it aligns with how light appears to be both a wave and a particle, in conclusion, I propose that light is the byproduct of a particle and wave working in union to give us what we call sight
If you see any reason why this would or wouldnt be true please reply
Side note: if this is true it would explain why plants are sensitive to sound waves, due to the effect it's used to absorbing the energy from light waves
 
Mar 1, 2023
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Your proposal is an interesting and creative hypothesis about the nature of light. However, it does not align with the currently accepted scientific understanding of light as a fundamental particle known as a photon that exhibits wave-like behavior.
According to the particle-wave duality of quantum mechanics, particles like photons can exhibit both wave-like and particle-like behavior, depending on how they are observed and measured. Therefore, it is not necessary to propose that light is a combination of a particle and a wave to explain its properties.
Regarding the mechanism of solar panels, when a photon of light is absorbed by a solar panel, it can transfer its energy to an electron, which can then be harnessed to generate an electrical current. This process does not require a chemical change, as you suggested.
Finally, while plants do respond to various types of stimuli, including sound waves, it is not due to their ability to absorb energy from light waves. Instead, plants have specialized cells called mechanoreceptors that can detect vibrations in their environment and trigger physiological responses.
In summary, while your proposal is an intriguing idea, it does not align with the current scientific understanding of light and its properties.
 
What sort of wave is light?

Remember the idea of Michael Faraday which evolved into the "magnetic field" concept--that even empty space in which magnetic forces can be observed is somehow changed, somehow not empty. Faraday also showed that a magnetic field which varied in time--like the one produced by an alternating current (AC)--could drive electric currents, if (say) copper wires were placed in it in an appropriate location. That action was termed "magnetic induction," the phenomenon on which electric transformers are based.

So, magnetic fields could produce electric currents, and we already know that electric currents produce magnetic fields. Would it perhaps be possible for space to support a wave motion alternating between the two?

James Clerk Maxwell--a bright Scotsman who also proposed the three-color theory of perceived light--solved the riddle by proposing that the equations of electricity needed one more term, representing an electric current which could travel through empty space, but only with very fast oscillations, not with a steady current.

With that term added (the "displacement current"), the equations of electricity and magnetism acquired a pleasing symmetry allowed a wave to exist, propagating at the speed of light. The drawing below illustrates such a wave--green is the magnetic part, blue the electric part from the term which Maxwell added. The wave is drawn propagating just along one line: actually it fills space, but it would be hard to draw that.


Maxwell proposed that it indeed was light. There had been earlier hints--the velocity of light had appeared unexpectedly in the equations of electricity and magnetism--and further studies confirmed it. For instance, if a beam of light hits the side of a glass prism, only part of it enters--another part gets reflected. Maxwell's theory correctly predicted an important property ("polarization") of the reflected beam. The next obvious question was: if this was an electromagnetic wave with wavelength around 0.5 microns, what about other wavelengths?

Heinrich Hertz in Germany calculated that any electric current swinging very rapidly back and forth in a conducting wire would radiate electromagnetic waves into the surrounding space (today we would call such a wire an "antenna"). With such a wire he created and detected (in 1886) such waves in his lab, using an electric spark, whose current oscillates rapidly (that is how lightning creates its characteristic crackling noise on a radio!). Today we call such waves "radio waves". At first however they were "Hertzian waves, " and even today we honor the memory of their discoverer by measuring frequencies in Hertz (Hz), the number of oscillations per second--and at radio frequencies, in megahertz (MHz).

Light and radio waves belong to the electromagnetic spectrum, the range containing all different electromagnetic (EM) waves. Over the years scientists and engineers have created EM waves of other frequencies--microwaves and various IR bands whose waves are longer than those of visible light (between radio and the visible), and UV, EUV, X-rays and γ-rays (gamma rays) with increasingly shorter wavelengths. The electromagnetic nature of x-rays became evident when it was found that crystals bent their path in the same way as gratings bent visible light: the orderly rows of atoms in the crystal acted like the grooves of a grating.

It should be stressed that such waves are very different from sound waves, which have no connection to electricity but are pressure waves, associated with the elasticity of solids, liquids and gases. TIt is true that the wavelength ranges of radio waves and sound overlap (somewhat). However, radio waves are stopped by a metal screen because it conducts electricity, while penetrating non-conducting solid walls (you can listen to your radio indoors!). Sound on the other hand is stopped by walls but penetrates the mesh of a screen.

Waves and particles seem to be diametrically opposed concepts: a wave fills a region in space, while an electron or ion has a well-defined location. That, at least, was the view before the discoveries of the first half of the 20th century. Those discoveries suggested that on the atomic scale, the distinction became blurred: waves had some properties of particles, and vice versa.

To find how a light wave passes through a telescope, one calculates its motion as if it filled the entire focusing mirror. Yet when that same wave gives up its energy to one individual atom, it turns out that it acts like a particle. Regardless of whether a light beam is bright or dim, its energy is always transmitted in atom-sized amounts, "photons" whose energy depends only on wavelength.

Observations have shown that such duality also existed in the opposite direction. An electron should in principle have at any time a well-defined location and velocity, yet experiments that measure them give a blurred result. Quantum physics tells us that arbitrary precision in such observations cannot be attained, but that the motion may be described by a wave.

This may be a good place for introducing new quantities and notations. An electromagnetic wave of wavelength λ (lambda, small Greek L) covers a distance of c meters each second, where c is the velocity of light in space, close to 300,000,000 meters/second. Its frequency ν (nu, small Greek N)--the number of up-and-down oscillations per second--is also the number of wave crests in that distance, and is therefore obtained by dividing c with the wavelength:
ν = c/ λ

A basic quantum law then states that the energy E in joules of a photon of light of frequency ν is
E = hν
where h = 6.624 10-34 joule-sec is "Planck's constant", a universal constant that is fundamental to all quantum theory. It was introduced in 1900 by Max Planck, when he tried to explain the "black body" distribution of wavelengths in the light emitted by a solid hot object. Incidentally, it was the above formula, published by Albert Einstein in 1905, that later earned him the Nobel prize, not (as many still believe) his theory of relativity.

Quantum physics is a huge subject, too big and too mathematical to cover here. It is only used briefly because of its claim that the amount of energy which an atom can receive from an electromagnetic wave--its photon--depends only on that wave's length.

The process also works the other way around: when "excited" atoms give up their excess energy to an electromagnetic wave (energy they might have received, say, through a collision with some fast atom in a glowing gas) they can only do so in photon-sized amounts. The fact that atomic emissions appear in narrowly defined "spectral lines" suggests that "excited" atoms cannot contain extra energy in arbitrary amounts, but must be in one of their "energy levels" which resonate with their structure, each associated with a precisely defined amount of energy.

Each atom also has a "ground state, " its lowest energy level and the one in which it prefers to stay. When it descends from some excited state to the ground state, the starting and final energies of the atom are precisely specified energy levels. The energy emitted, equal to the difference between the two, is thus narrowly defined, producing a photon with a precise wavelength. The great success of quantum mechanics has been its ability to calculate and predict the energy levels of various atoms and combinations of atoms.

The formula E = h ν = hc/λ means that the shorter the wavelength λ, the more energetic the photon. A photon of UV contains more energy than one of visible light, and photons of X-rays and γ-rays (gamma rays) are more energetic still. One therefore expects that hotter regions of the Sun, where individual particles have more energy, will emit electromagnetic radiation of shorter wavelength, and that is indeed observed.

See: https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sun5wave.htm

See: https://www.thoughtco.com/wave-particle-duality-2699037

The wave-particle duality principle of quantum physics holds that matter and light exhibit the behaviors of both waves and particles, depending upon the circumstances of the experiment and what is being measured.

The major significance of the wave-particle duality is that all behavior of light and matter can be explained through the use of a differential equation which represents a wave function, generally in the form of the Schrodinger equation. This ability to describe reality in the form of waves is at the heart of quantum mechanics.

The most common interpretation is that the wave function represents the probability of finding a given particle at a given point. These probability equations can diffract, interfere, and exhibit other wave-like properties, resulting in a final probabilistic wave function that exhibits these properties as well. Particles end up distributed according to the probability laws and therefore exhibit the wave properties. In other words, the probability of a particle being in any location is a wave, but the actual physical appearance of that particle is not.
Hartmann352