ABSTRACT

Having just described electromagnetic radiation as a wave, it may seem a bit peculiar to embark on a particle description of that radiation. Perhaps it will help to recall from Chapter 2 that our perception of something depends in part on the means we use to perceive it and that we used a specific experiment (interference) to define the wave property. There is no reason to believe that one human-invented experiment is the only one that can be used to describe electromagnetic radiation. In fact, the Einstein photoelectric effect, described next, is consistent with light being a particle.