Most people, even non-scientists, are aware these days of the notion that light acts sometimes like a wave, sometimes like a particle, depending on the circumstances. This wave-particle duality is a fundamental aspect of nature, applying to all elementary particles, from light particles (photons) to electrons, protons, neutrons, and the constituent quarks of the latter.
It is a difficult concept to fully grasp, and even today a complete explanation of what this means for physics, philosophically, continues to elude physicists. But the phenomenon can be demonstrated with light and with matter in experiments that are reasonably well-understood, and in particular Young’s double slit experiment has been used to highlight how the wave properties and the particle properties complement each other.
But when the particle properties of light were first postulated by Albert Einstein in 1905, nobody really had any idea how those particles could be reconciled with the wave properties that had been definitively demonstrated over 100 years earlier. Naturally, it fell to experiments to help clarify what the heck was going on, and the earliest experiment of this nature was done by G.I. Taylor in 1909, and the results appeared in a paper titled, “Interference fringes with feeble light.”
Taylor’s paper, though it is short (only two pages), is a fascinating look at both the theoretical and experimental challenges in that early quantum era, and in this post we’ll take a look at it and the work that led up to it.
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