Discussion Forum

# What Led Albert Einstein To Theorize That The Light is Composed of Photons?

IDK is not acceptable
Samson …. how old I am?

• me says:

well u see albert einstein is a smart person i’m guessing so i think that he thought he was so smart he could just guess

• (Ω)Mistress Bekki says:

the photoelectric effect–go wiki it.

Newton did postulate that light came in corpuscles (particles). But experiments like Young’s double slits had discredited the notion. Planck assumed that EM radiation is quantized to explain blackbody radiation. But everybody assumed it was some sort of mathematical trick, not real. Then Einstein used the notion that maybe light really did come in particles to explain the photoelectric effect. This was another step towards quantum mechanics, in which waves and particles are just different manifestations of the same thing at the microscopic level.

• Derick says:

The photon theory actually came first. Isaac Newton imagined that light must be made of tiny particles which obey Newton’s laws of motion. The wave theory of light came later and explains things like partial reflection, and why light has interference patters, better than the particle theory can. To this day the two theories are unresolved and that’s why physicist talk about the wave-particle duality of light.

Einstein’s big contributions where regarding the discover that the speed of light is constant, and that space and time are warped by gravity. He also theorized that light should be effected by gravity which was proved years later. This was also how black holes where theorized to exist decades before they were actually discovered.

• Samsonite says: