From the most distant stars in the sky to the screen in front of your face, light is everywhere. But the exact nature of light, and how it travels, has long puzzled scientists. One question in particular has vexed thinkers from Issac Newton to Albert Einstein: Is light a particle or a wave?
“Whether light is a particle or a wave is a very old question,” Riccardo Sapienza, a physicist at Imperial College London, told Live Science. As a species, we seem driven to understand the fundamental nature of the world around us, and this particular puzzle kept 19th-century scientists busy.
Today, there’s no doubt about the answer: Light is both a particle and a wave. But how did scientists reach this mind-bending conclusion?
The starting point was to scientifically distinguish between waves and particles. “You would describe an object as a particle if you can identify it as a point in space,” Sapienza said. “A wave is an object that you don’t define as a point in space and you need to give a frequency of oscillation and distance between maximum and minimum.”
The first conclusive evidence of the wave nature of light came in 1801, when Thomas Young performed his now-famous double-slit experiment. He placed a screen with two holes in front of a light source and observed the behavior of the light after it had passed through the slits. The light hitting the wall showed a complicated pattern of bright and dark bands, known as interference fringes.
As the light waves passed through each hole, they generated partial waves that radiated spherically, intercepting each other and adding or subtracting to the final intensity.
“If the light was a particle, you would have ended up with two bunches on the other side of the screen,” Sapienza said. “But we have interference, and we see light everywhere after the screen, not just at the position of the holes. That’s proof that light is indeed a wave.”
Eighty-six years later, Heinrich Hertz became the first to demonstrate the particle nature of light. He noticed that when ultraviolet light shone on a metal surface, it generated a charge — a phenomenon called the photoelectric effect. However, the significance of his observation wasn’t fully understood until many years later.
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Atoms contain electrons in fixed energy levels. Shining light on them is therefore expected to give the electrons energy and enable them to escape from the atom, with brighter light liberating electrons faster. But in experiments following Hertz’s work, several unusual observations seemed to completely contradict this classical understanding of physics.
It was Einstein who finally solved this puzzle, for which he was awarded a Nobel prize in 1921. Rather than absorbing light continuously from a wave, atoms actually receive energy in packets of light called photons, explaining odd observations such as the existence of a cutoff frequency.
But what determines whether light behaves as a wave or as a particle? According to Sapienza, this isn’t the right question to be asking. “Light is not sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave,” he said. “It is always both a wave and a particle. It’s just that we highlight one of the properties depending on which experiment we do.”
In day-to-day life, we mostly experience light as a wave, and it’s this form that physicists find most useful to manipulate.
“There’s a full field called metamaterials — by shaping a material with the same features as light, we can enhance the interaction of light with the material and control the waves,” Sapienza said. “For example, we can make solar absorbers that can absorb light more efficiently for energy generation or metamaterial MRI probes which are much more effective.”
However, light’s double nature, known as wave particle duality, is absolutely fundamental to the existence of the world as we know it. This strange twinned behavior also extends to other quantum particles, like electrons.
“You could not have an atom be stable if you didn’t have quantum mechanics with the electrons in specific states,” Sapienza said. “If you remove the fact that it is a particle, you remove the fact that it has a specific energy and life could not exist.”