It is somewhat surprising to hear from an optics physicist that after two thousand years of inquiry, the fundamental question "what is light" still remains. Classical theory describes light as electromagnetic waves, whereas quantum mechanics describes light as particles. The result is what physicists called the duality of light. But obviously not all physicists are satisfied with this duality explanation because of its inherent ambiguity.
The evolution of the understanding of light demonstrates the idea that understanding a theory means only understanding part of the reality, the part of reality that the theory can accurately predict observations.
Image source: xkcd.com
No comments:
Post a Comment