Despite Planck was recognized as the originator of quantum physics, he struggled for it throughout his life until his death. He never accepted his hν as Einstein’s photon. He believed that the origin of, hν, had not been discovered yet. In addition, the photon concept caused Einstein regret throughout his life. He wrote; I spent all my life trying to understand what a photon is, and haven't understand it by now, so the quanta are a hopeless mess. Is it possible or can we resolve such problem, which the eminent physicists consider it as a hopeless mess. In this article, I'm trying to obtain the Planck quantization of radiation energy E = n h ν, by a picture appealing to the imagination, I'm trying to introduce a new light mode called the wavy ray model.
Despite Planck was recognized as the originator of quantum physics, he struggled for it throughout his life until his death. He never accepted his hν as Einstein’s photon. He believed that the origin of, hν, had not been discovered yet. In addition, the photon concept caused Einstein regret throughout his life. He wrote; I spent all my life trying to understand what a photon is, and haven't understand it by now, so the quanta are a hopeless mess. Is it possible or can we resolve such problem, which the eminent physicists consider it as a hopeless mess. In this article, I'm trying to obtain the Planck quantization of radiation energy E = n h ν, by a picture appealing to the imagination, I'm trying to introduce a new light mode called the wavy ray model.
Abstract With the failure of classical physics to explain the experimentally observed black body radiation spectrum, the photoelectric effect and the existence of narrow spectral lines in the light emitted by excited atoms, physicists were forced to reach out for new ideas. Following Planck’s initial “drastic hypothesis” of light “quanta”, Einstein led the way in exploring some of the myriad implications of this idea. In particular, the study of fluctuations led to a new understanding of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with atoms. Einstein invented the photon by showing, through fluctuation studies, that light emitted by atoms must be in the form of plane waves. These ideas led to the first notions regarding the quantization of matter and its dynamics.
The idea of the photon has stirred the imaginations of physicists ever since 1905 when Einstein originally proposed the use of light quanta to explain the photoelectric effect. This concept is formalized in the quantum theory of radiation, which has had unfailing success in explaining the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter, seemingly limited only by the ability of physicists to perform the indicated calculations. Nevertheless, it has its conceptual problems—various infinities and frequent misinterpretations. Consequently an increasing number of workers are asking, “to what extent is the quantized field really necessary and useful?” In fact the experimental results of the photoelectric effect were explained by G. Wentzel in 1927 without the quantum theory of radiation. Similarly most electro-optic phenomena such as stimulated emission, reaction of the emitted field on the emitting atom, resonance fluorescence, and so on, do not require the quantization of the field for their explanation. As we will see, these processes can all be quantitatively explained and physically understood in terms of the semiclassical theory of the matter–field interaction in which the electric field is treated classically while the atoms obey the laws of quantum mechanics. The quantized field is fundamentally required for accurate descriptions of certain processes involving fluctuations in the electromagnetic field: for example, spontaneous emission, the Lamb shift, the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, and certain aspects of blackbody radiation. (The Compton effect also fits here, but see later under references 8b and c.) Here we will outline how the photon concept originated and developed, where it is not required and is often misused, and finally where it plays an essential role in the understanding of physical phenomena. In our discussion we will attempt to give a logically consistent definition of the word “photon”—a statement far more necessary than one might think, for so many contradictory uses exist of this elusive beast. In particular consider the original coining of the word by G. N. Lewis: “[because it appears to spend] only a minute fraction of its existence as a carrier of radiant energy, while the rest of the time it remains an important structural element within the atom…, I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon!” (our exclamation point). Clearly the present usage of the word is very different.
Classical electromagnetics in free space leaves no room for accommodation of a light particle. To underline this, it is sufficient to remember that Einstein in order to reach his lightquantum (energy-quantum) hypothesis had to mix classical theoretical physics with a piece of experimental information that defies description in classical terms. In his 1905-paper Einstein concluded [60]:Monochromatic radiation of low density (within the range of validity of Wien’s radiation formula) behaves thermodynamically as though it consisted of a number of mutually independent energy quanta of magnitude hν. The introduction of light quanta in the Wien regime (the high-frequency part of the Planck blackbody radiation law) is the first step toward the concept of electromagnetic radiation as a Bose gas of photons [180, 39, 68, 69]. Although a photon gas obeys Bose-Einstein statistics for all frequencies the statistical independence assumed by Einstein in 1905 is not true in general. Einstein used Boltzmann statistics when he conjectured the existence of light quanta. In the Wien regime Boltzmann and Bose-Einstein statistics lead to the same conclusion since the mean number of particles (photons) with a given energy is much less than one. The circumstance that the light quanta are not statistically independent in Bose-Einstein counting finds its explanation in quantum mechanics. Hence, the statistical correlation is induced by the requirement of totally symmetric wave functions.
Planck’s 1900 introduction of the “energy elements”, i.e., electromagnetic radiation quanta of energy hν each, for founding his radiation law marks the origin of quantum theory and is discussed in all courses on this subject. Surprisingly, the question whether Planck really implied quantisation is debated among historians of physics. We present a simplified account of that debate which also sheds light on the issue of indistinguishability and Einstein’s light quantum hypothesis. Here, the relevance of the notion ‘(in)distinguishability’ is often overemphasized. It has to be treated together with ‘equality’, ‘identity’, and ‘interchangeability’, where the latter one is the decisive notion in this context. As a result, the difference between Planck’s and Einstein’s concepts of ‘light particles’ becomes more easily to grasp. For that and many other reasons, we believe that the teaching of quantum physics benefits from including the material presented here, and that beyond the demand of historical completeness. Nevertheless, for the sake of our readers’ convenience, we almost completely reprint Planck’s former students Hettner’s remembering of Planck’s way to his radiation law, together with its translation into English. It seems that Planck has not really done the calculations described in his December 1900 lecture. For this, following Becker, we show how to overcome the difficulties over there, and we sketch his simplifying approach in his subsequent 1901 article. Strangely enough, in his 1906/07 lectures on the theory of heat radiation, Planck deviates from those calculations and obtains a non-extensive entropy. This, too, is most easily analyzed using Bach’s three-level scheme ‘configuration. occupation. occupancy’ for the counting combinatorics involved. Boltzmann’s 1877, Planck’s 1900, Einstein’s 1905, Bose’s 1924, and other treatments are systematized using that scheme
Where did we get that [equation] from? Nowhere. It is not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger. Richard Feynman De Broglie's matter waves The early struggles of physicists towards a quantum theory were mostly concerned with attempts to understand the nature of light. The traditional picture of light as a wave motion had been challenged by Planck and Einstein. They had shown that certain experimental results that were impossible to understand in terms of a wave picture could be easily explained if light was thought of as a stream of particles, now called photons. William Bragg, who, with his son, won the 1915 Nobel Prize for studies of crystal structure using X-rays, summarized this dilemma for physics by exclaiming in despair that he was teaching the corpuscular theory of light on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the undulatory theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays! Physicists were still wrestling with these apparently contradictory properties of light when, in 1924, Prince Louis de Broglie (pronounced ‘de Broy’) suggested that all matter, even objects that we usually think of as particles – such as electrons – should also display wavelike behaviour! This revolutionary idea was completely unexpected and, what is more, was included by de Broglie in his Ph. D. thesis. Like most people, physicists are generally reluctant to accept any wild new idea, especially if there is not a shred of evidence to support it.
Einstein’s 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, in which he considered Planck’s idea of quanta of energy to be a universal characteristic of light, marks the beginning of quantum theory. For over ten years Einstein stood alone on the issue of energy quantization of light; and although in 1915 experimental conrmation of his photoelectric effect came from painstaking experiments performed by Millikan, acceptance of the idea that light was composed of particles was far from universal. Millikan himself wrote in 1915: “Despite … the apparent complete success of the Einstein equation, the physical theory of which it was designed to be the symbolic expression is found so untenable that Einstein himself, I believe, no longer holds to it.” Einstein did hold to it. It was only in the mid 1920s, when Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, and others developed the rst forms of quantum theory, that serious discussions concerning the particle nature of light and the meaning of the new theory began. Discussions about the meaning of quantum theory continue today.