March 2014
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
26h 33m
English
The experiments that led to the development of quantum theory were concerned with the interaction of light and matter. On the one hand, there were phenomena such as interference or diffraction which clearly indicated that light has a wave character as proposed by Huygens, in contrast to the particle or corpuscular view of light proposed by Newton. But on the other hand, many experiments at the turn of the 20th century clearly showed that a new theory of light was needed.
An important observation by Planck indicated that radiation from a heated sample, known as blackbody radiation, is emitted in discrete units of energy called quanta; the energy units were described by hv, where v