1. Which are the experiments in support of the corpuscular nature of light? what
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Question
1. Which are the experiments in support of the corpuscular nature of light? what are the experiments that show that instead the light is a wave? Describe and explain the optical phenomenon of the diffraction.
2. What is the speed of light in a vacuum? How does it compare to the speed of sound? When was the speed of light first measured with a certain degree of accuracy? How was the speed of light finally measured? Compare the methods used to obtain these measurements (the early one and the most recent one)
Explanation / Answer
Experiments that show the particle nature of light:
Photoelectric effect, Some indication can be obtained from the Black-Body Problem
Experiments that show the wave nature of light:
Diffraction, Interference, Reflection, Refraction, Polarization.
Diffraction refers to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle or a slit. It is defined as the bending of light around the corners of an obstacle or aperture into the region of geometrical shadow of the obstacle.
Diffraction arises because of the way in which waves propagate; this is described by the Huygens–Fresnel principle and theprinciple of superposition of waves. The propagation of a wave can be visualized by considering every particle of the transmitted medium on a wavefront as a point source for a secondary spherical wave. The wave displacement at any subsequent point is the sum of these secondary waves. When waves are added together, their sum is determined by the relative phases as well as the amplitudes of the individual waves so that the summed amplitude of the waves can have any value between zero and the sum of the individual amplitudes. Hence, diffraction patterns usually have a series of maxima and minima.
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