English
physicist James Bradley obtained a better measurement in 1729. Bradley found
it necessary to keep changing the tilt of his telescope to catch the light
from stars as the earth went around the sun. He concluded that the earth's
motion was sweeping the telescope sideways relative to the light that was
coming down the telescope. The angle of tilt, called the stellar aberration,
is approximately the ratio of the orbital speed of the earth to the speed
of light. (This is one of the ways scientists determined that the earth moves
around the sun and not vice versa.)
In the mid-19th
century, French physicist Armand Fizeau directly measured the speed of light
by sending a narrow beam of light between gear teeth in the edge of a rotating
wheel. The beam then travelled a long distance to a mirror and came back
to the wheel where, if the spin were fast enough, a tooth would block the
light. Knowing the distance to the mirror and the speed of the wheel, Fizeau
could calculate the speed of light. During the same period, the French physicist
Jean Foucault made other, more accurate experiments of this sort with spinning
mirrors.
Scientists
needed accurate measurements of the speed of light because they were looking
for the medium that light travelled in. They called the medium ether, which
they believed waved to produce the light. If ether existed, then the speed
of light should appear larger or smaller depending on whether the person
measuring it was moving toward or away from the ether waves. However, all
measurements of the speed of light in different moving reference frames gave
the same value.
In 1887 the American physicists Albert A. Michelson
and Edward Morley performed a very sensitive experiment designed to detect
the effects of ether. They constructed an interferometer with two light
beamsone that pointed along the direction of the earth's motion, and
one that pointed in a direction perpendicular to the earth's motion. The
beams were reflected by mirrors at the ends of their paths and returned to
a common point where they could interfere. Along the first beam, the scientists
expected the earth's motion to increase or decrease the beam's velocity so
that the number of wave cycles throughout the path would be changed slightly
relative to the second beam, resulting in a characteristic interference pattern.
Knowing the velocity of the earth, it was possible to predict the change
in the number of cycles and the resulting interference pattern that would
be observed. The Michelson-Morley apparatus was fully capable of measuring
it, but the scientists did not find the expected results.
The paradox
of the constancy of the speed of light created a major problem for physical
theory that German-born American physicist Albert Einstein finally resolved
in 1905. Einstein suggested that physical theories should not depend on the
state of motion of the observer. Instead, Einstein said the speed of light
had to remain constant, and all the rest of physics had to be changed to
be consistent with this fact. This special theory of relativity predicted
many unexpected physical consequences, all of which have since been observed
in nature.
History of Light Theories
The earliest
speculations about light were hindered by the lack of knowledge about how
the eye works. The Greek philosophers from as early as Pythagoras, who lived
during the 5th century BC, believed light issued forth from visible things,
but most also thought vision, as distinct from light, proceeded outward from
the eye. Plato gave a version of this theory in his dialogue Timaeus, written
in the 3rd century BC, which greatly influenced later thought.
Some early
ideas of the Greeks, however, were correct. The philosopher and statesman
Empedocles believed that light travels with finite speed, and the philosopher
and scientist Aristotle accurately explained the rainbow as a kind of reflection
from raindrops. The Greek mathematician Euclid understood the law of reflection
and the properties of mirrors. Early thinkers also observed and recorded
the phenomenon of refraction, but they did not know its mathematical law.
The mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy was the first person on record to
collect experimental data on optics, but he too believed vision issued from
the eye. His work was further developed by the Egyptian scientist Ibn al
Haythen, who worked in Iraq and Egypt and was known to Europeans as Alhazen.
Through logic and experimentation, Alhazen finally discounted Plato's theory
that vision issued forth from the eye. In Europe, Alhazen was the most well
known among a group of Islamic scholars who preserved and built upon the
classical Greek tradition. His work influenced all later investigations on
light.
Early Scientific Theories
The early
modern scientists Galileo, Johannes Kepler of Germany, and René Descartes
of France all made contributions to the understanding of light. Descartes
discussed optics and reported the law of refraction in his famous Discours
de la méthode (Discourse on Method), published in 1637. The Dutch
astronomer and mathematician Willebrord Snell independently discovered the
law of refraction in 1620, and the law is now named after him.
During the
late 1600s, an important question emerged: Is light a swarm of particles,
or is it a wave in some pervasive medium through which ordinary matter freely
moves? English physicist Sir Isaac Newton was a proponent of the particle
theory, and Huygens developed the wave theory at about the same time. At
the time it seemed that wave theories could not explain optical polarization
because waves that scientists were familiar with moved parallel, not
perpendicular, to the direction of wave travel. On the other hand, Newton
had difficulty explaining the phenomenon of interference of light. His
explanation forced a wavelike property on a particle description. Newton's
great prestige coupled with the difficulty of explaining polarization caused
the scientific community to favour the particle theory, even after English
physicist Thomas Young analysed a new class of interference phenomena using
the wave theory in 1803.
The wave
theory was finally accepted after French physicist Augustin Fresnel supported
Young's ideas with mathematical calculations in 1815 and predicted surprising
new effects. Irish mathematician Sir William Hamilton clarified the relationship
between wave and particle viewpoints by developing a theory that unified
optics and mechanics. Hamilton's theory was important in the later development
of quantum mechanics.
Between
the time of Newton and Fresnel, scientists developed mathematical techniques
to describe wave phenomena in fluids and solids. Fresnel and his successors
were able to use these advances to create a theory of transverse waves that
would account for the phenomenon of optical polarization. As a result, an
entire wave theory of light existed in mathematical form before the British
physicist James Clerk Maxwell began his work on electromagnetism. In his
theory of electromagnetism, Maxwell showed that electric and magnetic fields
affect each other in such a way as to permit waves to travel through space.
The equations he derived to describe these electromagnetic waves matched
the equations scientists already knew to describe light. Maxwell's equations,
however, were more general in that they described electromagnetic phenomena
other than light and they predicted waves throughout the electromagnetic
spectrum. In addition, his theory gave the correct speed of light in terms
of the properties of electricity and magnetism. When the German physicist
Gustav Hertz later detected electromagnetic waves at lower frequencies, which
the theory predicted, the basic correctness of Maxwell's theory was
confirmed.
Maxwell's
work left unsolved a problem common to all wave theories of light. A wave
is a continuous phenomenon, which means that when it travels, its electromagnetic
field must move at each of the infinite number of points in every small part
of space. When we add heat to any system to raise its temperature, the energy
is shared equally among all the parts of the system that can move. When this
idea is applied to light, with an infinite number of moving parts, it appears
to require an infinite amount of heat to give all the parts equal energy.
But thermal radiation, the process in which heated objects emit electromagnetic
waves, occurs in nature with a finite amount of heat. Something that could
account for this process was missing from Maxwell's theory. In 1900 Max Planck
provided the missing concept. He proposed the existence of a light quantum,
a finite packet of energy that became known as the photon.
Modern Theory
Planck's theory remained mystifying until Einstein showed how it could be used to explain the photoelectric effect, in which the speed of ejected electrons was related not to the intensity of light, but to its frequency. This was consistent with Planck's theory, which suggested that a photon's energy was related to its frequency. During the next two decades scientists recast all of physics to be consistent with Planck's theory. The result was a picture of the physical world that was different from anything ever before imagined. Its essential feature is that all matter appears in physical measurements to be made of quantum bits, which are something like particles. Unlike the particles of Newtonian physics, however, a quantum particle cannot be viewed as having a definite path of movement that can be predicted through laws of motion. Quantum physics only permits the prediction of the probability of where particles may be found. The probability is the squared amplitude of a wave field, sometimes called the wave function associated with the particle. For photons the underlying probability field is what we know as the electromagnetic field. The current world view that scientists use, called the Standard Model, divides particles into two categories: fermions (building blocks of atoms, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons), which cannot exist in the same place at the same time, and bosons, such as photons, which can (see Elementary Particles). Bosons are the quantum particles associated with the force fields that act on the fermions. Just as the electromagnetic field is a combination of electric and magnetic force fields, there is an even more general field called the electroweak field. This field combines electromagnetic forces and the weak nuclear force. The photon is one of four bosons associated with this field. The other three bosons have large masses and decay, or break apart, quickly to lighter components outside the nucleus of the atom.