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Physics Essays

The wave-particle dilemma in light

John-Erik Persson

Published Jun 13, 2021• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The origin of the wave-particle dilemma is analyzed. It is found that this dilemma started much earlier than normally is assumed, by mistakes related to Michelson‐Morley's tests. By regarding these mistakes, we find that a physics without quanta in light, and without time dilation, is possible.
DOI
10.4006/0836-1398-34.2.211

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When in the spring of 1926 Erwin Schrödinger set out the form of the equation for wave propagation and drew important conclusions from it, in some very elegant work which appeared to develop the ideas which I had introduced in 1923–24 (de Broglie 1924), he really profoundly modified the ideas which had guided me two years earlier in my original research. For his idea was that although the ψ wave which he was introducing was still a true physical wave propagated in space and time, it would not have any single area of high field concentration which could be a particle; whereas in my original concept I assumed that the coexistence of waves and particles, perceived by Einstein in 1905 in respect of light in his theory of light quanta, should be extended to all types of particle in the form of the coexistence of a physical wave with a particle incorporated in it.
Light quanta The history of the corpuscular and wave controversy in optical theory is well known. At the end of the last century physicists had no doubt as to the wave character of light, and the acceptance of the wave theory meant the rejection of the corpuscular theory. The possibility of both being correct and helpful to one another had not been much thought about and still less explored. At about this time Planck's quantum theory appeared and was soon followed in 1905 by Einstein's theory of ‘light quanta’ to explain the photo-electric effect, for which the wave theory alone had utterly failed to account. Einstein assumed that radiation exists in discrete ‘quanta’ of energy hν , where ν is the frequency; thus a quantum is a separate thing, like a corpuscle, and has a frequency associated with it, like a wave. There was a blend of the two older theories involved. This idea has been generalised by the speculations of Louis de Broglie, who pointed out the important clue given by the theory of relativity, namely, that of the identity of mass and energy, so that the conservation of mass is therefore also the conservation of energy. This suggested to him that all forms of energy (including radiation) should have an atomic structure, like matter; and that the atoms of energy are grouped round certain singular points, forming electrons, light quanta, and the like.
An early criticism of the experimental background of special relativity theory was that the Michelson-Morley experiment was bidirectional in the moving frame. This experiment did not require that the velocity of light is constant in all Galilean frames, but only that the average to-and-fro velocities are constant. These objections were removed with the experimental verification of the time dilation effect predicted by relativity theory. It is coneptually simple to devise a unidirectional ether drift experiment based on a measure of fringe shifts. The experiment could not be performed in Michelson's time because of the large coherence lengths required for the observation of the fringe shifts. For an interference arrangement similar to that used to produce Young's fringes, a coherence length greater than a meter is required in order to observe a displacement of 0.01 fringes. Such coherence lengths are available today from continuous wave lasers.
"Our Universe does not have a real cosmic medium". "Light is fundamentally dual, comprising a wave aspect and a particle aspect". These two statements are jointly present in most physics textbooks, but they are logically incompatible. The argument against mediation is based on the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment. It only works under the assumption that light is a running wave in the ether, similar to a sound wave in the air. Without such an assumption, invariance only proves that the speed of light is not the speed of a wave. If light has a dual nature, then the speed of light is the speed of the particle aspect. In quantum mechanics, it can be described as the speed of the photon. Classical models would suggest that the speed of light is equal to the rate of mutual generation of electric and magnetic fields across space. Alternatively, the speed of light can be described as the speed of a train of fields, propagating like a stream of particles. There is no room for running waves in these models, except as a constituent element of static fields. For a coherent account of our knowledge, the second statement should be preserved, and the first one should be rejected.