Related papers: Photon: New light on an old name
In modern physics courses the idea of photon has been teaching through from the einsteinian formulation based on the photoelectric effect. Einstein's photon concept allow the quantization of the electromagnetic field, but does not dwell on…
We discuss the absorber theory of radiation as put forward by Wheeler and Feynman. We show that it gives a better understanding of the photon compared to the usual quantum electrodynamics (QED) picture.
In the year 1900 Max Planck was led by experimental observations to propose a strange formula for the intensity as a function of frequency for light emitted by a cavity. It relied on peculiar properties to be obeyed by the emitters and…
Modern attempts to understand light go back to Newton who considered light to be particles, the so called corpuscular theory, and the other school of Huygens, Young and others. Huygens and Young viewpoint emphasised the wave property. This…
James Clerk Maxwell unknowingly discovered a correct relativistic, quantum theory for the light quantum, forty-three years before Einstein postulated the photon's existence. In this theory, the usual Maxwell field is the quantum wave…
The purpose of this article is to show that the standard method of introducing the quantum description of the electromagnetic field -- by canonical field quantization -- is not the only one. We have chosen instead as the starting point the…
We present a translation of Albert Einstein's Rio de Janeiro manuscript on light quanta. In it, Einstein evaluates the Bohr-Kramers-Slater refutation of light quanta, which was concurrently the subject of intense empirical scrutiny on two…
The talk consists of three parts. ``History'' briefly describes the emergence and evolution of the concept of photon during the first two decades of the 20th century. ``Mass'' gives a short review of the literature on the upper limit of the…
In 1907, Einstein suggested an experiment with flying atoms for corroborating time dilation. In that paper, the flying atom was conceived as a flying clock: the reference to the Doppler effect was only indirect (the experiments by Stark to…
The photon is modeled as a monochromatic solution of Maxwell's equations confined as a soliton wave by the principle of causality of special relativity. The soliton travels rectilinearly at the speed of light. The solution can represent any…
De Broglie believed that the photon has a mass, a view shared by a few others. Quite recently, the author has argued that the photon has a mass which is consistent with the latest experimental limits. In the present paper we point out that…
The analysis of the Doppler effect for photons in rotating systems, studied using the M\"ossbauer effect, confirms the general conclusions of a previous paper dedicated to experiments with photons emitted/absorbed by atoms/nuclei in…
De Broglie's original idea that a photon is composed of a neutrino-antineutrino pair bound by some interaction was severely modified by Jordan. Although Jordan addressed an important problem (photon statistics) that de Broglie had not…
An antisymmetric tensor, the photon tensor, is defined for the description of the photon as a massless relativistic particle. The photon can be visualized as an essentially two dimensional rotating object. The quantum mechanical description…
In near-field optics and optical tunneling theory, photon wave mechanics, i.e., the first quantized theory of the photon, allows us to address the spatial field localization problem in a flexible manner which links smoothly to classical…
In 1905 the well-known physicist Max Planck was coeditor of the Annalen der Physik, and he accepted Einstein's paper on light quanta for publication, even though he disliked the idea of "light quanta". Einstein's relativity paper was…
The status of the photon in the modern physics was analysed. Within the frames of the Standard Model of particle physics the photon is considered to be the genuine elementary particle, being to be the messenger of the electromagnetic…
The Einstein-First project approaches the teaching of Einsteinian physics through the use of physical models and analogies. This paper presents an approach to the teaching of quantum physics which begins by emphasising the particle-nature…
Standard pedagogy introduces optics as though it were a consequence of Maxwell's equations, and only grudgingly admits, usually in a rushed aside, that light has a particulate character that can somehow be reconciled with the wave picture.…
In the year 1905 Albert Einstein published four papers that raised him to a giant in the history of science of all times. These works encompass the photon hypothesis (for which he obtained the Nobel prize in 1921), his first two papers on…