Related papers: The comprehensive theory of light
The evolution of light theories began with Isaac Newton's corpuscular model, which explained reflection and refraction but could not account for diffraction and interference. In contrast, Christiaan Huygens proposed a wave theory,…
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.…
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 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…
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…
This is the first expression of my thoughts and my experiments with Nature about the mathematical description of the Universe. The theories about our surrounding Nature became popular from our ancient civilizations and may be from the…
Planck's law for black-body radiation marks the origin of quantum theory and is discussed in all introductory (or advanced) courses on this subject. However, the question whether Planck really implied quantisation is debated among…
The Lorenz electromagnetic theory of light, published two years after the Maxwell theory, starts by postulating that both scalar and vector potentials are retarded. We show that in spite of this postulate, Lorenz's theory gives a…
It is currently believed that light quantum or the quantization of light energy is beyond classical physics and the picture of wave-particle duality, which was criticized by Einstein but attracted a number of experimental researches, is…
Independent of Maxwell, in 1867 the Danish physicist L. V. Lorenz proposed a theory in which he identified light with electrical oscillations propagating in a very poor conductor. Lorenz's electrodynamic theory of light, which formally was…
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…
Quantum electrodynamics is the well-accepted theory. However, we feel it is useful to look at formalisms that provide alternative ways to describe light, because in the recent years the development of quantum field theories based primarily…
Classical theory asserts that several electromagnetic waves cannot interact with matter if they interfere destructively to zero, whereas quantum mechanics predicts a nontrivial light-matter dynamics even when the average electric field…
The existence of twisted light may be inferred from modern quantum concepts and experimental data. These waves possess energy, impulse and angular momentum. However, the Maxwell's four-dimensional theory of electromagnetism does not imply…
There are some reasons to consider the existing theory of photodetection as not complete. An attempt to improve it on the basis of the well known considerations of black body radiation given by Bose and Einstein is presented below.
After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term "photon" in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein's light quantum. However, Lewis' photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or…
The discovery of the Planck's relation is generally regarded as the starting point of quantum physics. The Planck's constant h is now regarded as one of the most important universal constants. The physical nature of h, however, has not been…
The erroneous prediction of the speed of light in dispersive media has been looked upon historically as unequivocal proof that Newton's corpuscular theory is incorrect. Examination of his arguments shows that they were only directly…
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…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to understand the scaffolding of the Universe and its evolution. Einstein's general theory of relativity has been scrutinized for over ninety five years and shown to describe accurately all phenomena…