Books etc

Waves

Imagine you’re at the beach watching the sea. Waves in the water go up and down in a rolling motion. Waves aren’t just in water: there are waves in light and sound, and even in waves you can’t see, like radio waves. What is a Wave? A wave is just a way that energy moves from one place to anoth...…
in macroscopic concepts
Waves

Discovery of the electron as a wave

The first physicist to suggest that electrons could also exhibit wave-like behavior was the French nobleman Louis De Broglie. In 1924, De Broglie proposed the principle of wave-particle duality for all components of matter, not just electrons. This principle means that the particles that constitut...…
in history
Discovery of the electron as a wave

Diffraction

When waves move toward the shore, they usually go in a straight line. But what if there’s something in the way, like a big rock sticking out of the water or an opening in a wall like in the image above? Instead of just stopping, some of the waves go around the rock or though the opening and spread...…
in macroscopic concepts
Diffraction

Double-slit experiment

The double-slit experiment was invented in 1801 by Thomas Young to study the nature of light. Young was convinced that light behaved like a wave, while other scientists, such as Isaac Newton, preferred to think of it as composed of corpuscles (= light particles). Young decided to pass a beam o...…
in history
Double-slit experiment

Wave or particle?

Thomas Young, a British scientist, was one of the first to explore this question. He invented the double-slit experiment to determine whether light behaves as a wave or as a collection of particles. The basic idea is to study a beam of objects whose nature is unknown and observe how they behave. T...…
in questions
Wave or particle?

Wave-particle duality

In the realm of particles, many phenomena are profoundly different from anything we experience in our everyday world. For instance, it seems obvious to us that a tennis ball and an ocean wave are two entirely different things. We’re also absolutely sure that ocean waves will never turn into tennis b...…
in quantum concepts
Wave-particle duality