Who discovered wave particles duality?

Answer 1

The basic particle theory states that there are three states of matter - solids, liquids and gases. A solid substance has all its particles very close together, and strongly bound to each other so that the cannot move around (they can only vibrate on the spot). A liquid still has its particles close together, but they are now free to move around each other (hence the flowing motion that a liquid has). A gas has its particles distant from each other (on a microscopic scale, of course), and they are free to fly around at very high speeds in any direction. This is why a gas can fill any space, because the particles have no intermolecular bonds to stop them from spacing out.

Answer 2

That phrase is used to refer to the fact that light, and all other electromagnetic radiation,

behaves like both a series of waves and a stream of little bullets (particles).

If you build an experiment that looks for characteristics of waves, light provides them.

And if the experiment is designed to detect characteristics of particles, light provides

those too.

So if someone asks "is light really a wave or a particle ?", the best, most honest

answer is: "Yes".

Answer 3

The theory that light acts as a particle and a wave. During Huygen's double slit experiment, it is proven that It acts as a wave, however wave properties do not explain dispersion or reflection.

Answer 4

It means that light behaves as both.

If you design an experiment that detects waves, the behavior of light fits right in.
And if you design an experiment that detects particles, the behavior of light fits
right into that one just as well.

Whichever behavior you're looking for, light satisfies it. So when the question is
asked: "Is light made of waves or particles ?", the best answer is "Yes".

Answer 5

The most common example, is in light. There are experiments (interference, diffraction) which show that it is clearly a wave. And others, notably the photoelectric effect, show it clearly to be a particle. The higher the frequency the more particle-like it appears. Equally, things which to us are clearly particles, can have wave properties. The electrons which used to bang onto the phosphors on our TV screens can also behave as pure waves (eg electron microscope, and electronic behaviour in atoms).

Answer 6

The idea of wave-particle duality is the only concept that we have been able to apply to explain the behavior of light (and other physical phenomenon). Classical physics cannot account for the observations we've made regarding what light does, and there had to be another way to explain it. Let's begin with a couple of observations that puzzled investigators. Imagine a shotgun being fired at a target. The shot, each a little "particle" of material, moves down range from its origin, and as it moves, it spreads out a bit. Now imagine a beam of light from a light bulb. It basically goes in all directions, and it lights up a wall. If we put a piece of paper between the light bulb and the wall and punch a little hole in it, the light going through the hole will be a "beam" coming out the other side of the hole. It will paint a spot on the wall, but upon close inspection, the spot will not be sharply defined. It will be "fuzzy" around the edges because the "particles" of light "spread out" like the shot from the shot gun. Only particles behave this way. Let's look at some water waves now. We'll use a swimming pool that is calm, and we'll divide it with a little barrier to block waves. Now we'll put a little wave generator at one end. Waves generated in that half of the pool will be reflected off the wall, and the other side will remain calm. Now we'll put a little "gate" in the wall to let waves through. The waves will come through the gate and spread out, and the waves will form arcs centered on the gate as that is their source. See it? Now we'll put another gate in the wall a little ways from the first one. You won't believe what happens. Each gate will act as a wave source, and the waves will spread out in arcs from each source. The two waves will interact with each other, and there will be places where troughs meet troughs and crests meet crests and the waves will be bigger. But there will be places where crests meet troughs and the waves will "cancel" each other! There will be "dead spots" in this half of the pool where there is no movement of the water because the sums of the two waves at that point are zero. These places are called nodal lines, and they will be plainly visible. You can see where we're going with this. It can be demonstrated that light behaves in exactly this way, though it is a bit less simple to demonstrate it (as compared to the pool experiment). And only if light is a wave could it produce the same kind of result in an experiment (which it does). Is light a particle or a wave? One experiment demonstrates that it is one thing, and the other experiment demonstrates that it is the other. And the kicker is that the two ideas we pull from the experiments are mutually exclusive! It's one or the other. Or is it? Back in the day (the 17th century) Newton and Huygens come up with the idea that light was a particle and a wave, respectively. And the debate continued for over two hundred years. Then in stepped "Big Al" Einstein, and things changed. Physicists have come to accept that fundamental particles they observe will exhibit the characteristics of both a particle and a wave, depending on how an observer sets up an experiment. The observations have been with us a long time, and only the out-of-the-box thinking practiced by Einstein, de Broglie and other investigators lead to the idea of wave-particle duality. Links can be found below for more information.

Answer 7

The wave particle duality of light is accepted because of experimental observations. It becomes imperative to keep in mind that we model objects as particles and waves in order to explain the phenomenon we observe. The two slit experiment is a good example of this duality (if you Google Dr. Quantum's double slit experiment it visually shows what is going on pretty well). Basically you have a screen, a plate with two slits, and a light source. If you shine the light and look at the screen what do you see? You might think you would see the pattern of the two slits on the screen, but you actually see what is called an interference pattern. The only way to explain this is to model the light as particles when they are passing through the slits and waves everywhere else.

This may be more than you wanted, but experiments such as the slit experiments provide a reason for accepting particle-wave duality.

Answer 8

when a beam of light having both wave and particle character.

Answer 9

The way I see it is that neither one is true,

we don't (yet) know the true nature of matter,

and that the best we can do is to use the models we do understand to explain it.

Answer 10

Quantum mechanics.