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Speaker 1: Is it possible to be two different things at the
Speaker 1: same time?
Speaker 4: Can you like dogs and cats?
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Speaker 1: In today's podcast, we talk about the centuries old scientific
Speaker 1: debate about light.
Speaker 4: Is light a particle or a wave?
Speaker 1: Or is it both? Hello, I'm Jorge and I'm Daniel.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
Speaker 1: In which we try to explain the whole universe and
Speaker 1: everything in it, including light.
Speaker 4: Now, I'm a tunis I draw something called PhD comics.
Speaker 1: And I'm a particle physicist. During the day, I smash
Speaker 1: particles together at the Large Hadron Collider.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, today on the program, we're going to talk
Speaker 4: about the nature of light.
Speaker 1: That's right. People have been arguing for centuries. What is light?
Speaker 1: Is it made out of particles? Is it made out
Speaker 1: of waves? Something else? Is it tiny little puppies screaming
Speaker 1: through space? People have gone back and forth on the issue,
Speaker 1: and today even the topic is not yet totally settled.
Speaker 1: So we're going to be taking you through that history
Speaker 1: and breaking it down.
Speaker 4: It's one of the most mind blowing questions in human
Speaker 4: scientific history.
Speaker 1: That's right, what is light made out of? So as usual,
Speaker 1: before we dig into it, we went out and we
Speaker 1: asked people on the street, what do you think light
Speaker 1: is made out of? What do people know about light?
Speaker 4: Is light a particle or is it a wave.
Speaker 1: Here's what people had to say. Do you think light
Speaker 1: is made out of particles or waves or both or neither? Photos? Yeah, photons? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you think light's a particle. I think it's waves,
Speaker 1: youth waves. Yeah, cool, it's.
Speaker 5: Both, I think because it like moves like a wave,
Speaker 5: but it also has properties of a particle and there's
Speaker 5: nothing saying it can't people, okay, light, I think they're
Speaker 5: made of wavelength Yeah all right.
Speaker 4: Well it's interesting because I think all of the answers
Speaker 4: are right.
Speaker 1: Or none of them are rest or both.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, it seems like a lot of people reflected the
Speaker 1: fact that there is a controversy like that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not really well described, but either those some people
Speaker 1: went all in, you know, like it's a photon or
Speaker 1: it's a wave, or it's a wave.
Speaker 4: Length right, Yeah, that was my favorite one.
Speaker 1: I want to be a wavelength, Like I've heard of
Speaker 1: this word.
Speaker 4: It sounds really cool and scientific. I'm just going to
Speaker 4: throw it out there.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, maybe I get some points. We award
Speaker 1: no points people, no points, that's right. There's no price.
Speaker 1: Your price is you get to be on our podcast,
Speaker 1: and maybe we even make fun of you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I guess what you mean is
Speaker 4: nobody sort of fell for the trap, right, Like nobody said, oh,
Speaker 4: of course it's a particle, or nobody said, oh of
Speaker 4: course it's a wave. Most people sort of knew that
Speaker 4: there's some sort of duality there, something weird going on.
Speaker 1: That's right, That science is having some trouble, some difficulty
Speaker 1: coming up with a way to describe what light is.
Speaker 1: And that might seem surprising you because light is everywhere, right,
Speaker 1: and it runs the universe. It's streaming through the Solar
Speaker 1: system from the Sun, illuminating our lives, empowering everything on Earth.
Speaker 1: So you think this would be sort of a high
Speaker 1: priority topic to figure out, like what is this stuff?
Speaker 1: What is it made out of?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean, like, what are we paying you for, Daniel,
Speaker 4: if not to figure these types of questions out.
Speaker 1: I was just about to figure out what light was
Speaker 1: when you called and said it's time to do this podcast.
Speaker 4: Sorry, science was totally destroy your train of thought.
Speaker 1: There, that's right. Reflect on that for a minute or again.
Speaker 4: But no, Yeah, I'm a California taxpayer. Part of my
Speaker 4: salary goes to paying your salary, Like you know, one
Speaker 4: million of a percent.
Speaker 1: That's true. Yes, so you're saying you did pay taxes
Speaker 1: last year. Again, that's another topic.
Speaker 4: On air Daniel anyway, So that's an interesting question, like
Speaker 4: is light a waver or particle? And it's weird that
Speaker 4: we don't know, But maybe let's break it down a
Speaker 4: little bit. What is it? Like, what are we actually
Speaker 4: talking about when we say that light could be a
Speaker 4: particle or light could be a wave, like you know,
Speaker 4: most people probably think of light as just like just
Speaker 4: like brightness, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing to understand here is that we try
Speaker 1: to describe light in terms of things we know, and
Speaker 1: that's what science is. Right. You see something weird and new,
Speaker 1: and you wonder, oh, is it like this other thing
Speaker 1: I know? So we've observed different kinds of phenomena in
Speaker 1: the world, like you see waves, right, you go to
Speaker 1: the beach, you see waves and water. You drop a
Speaker 1: rock in a small puddle, you see waves. We know
Speaker 1: what waves are, and we see different phenomena. We try
Speaker 1: to categorize them in terms of things we know, right. So,
Speaker 1: like when people were studying sound, they discovered, oh, sound
Speaker 1: is actually a wave. You know, it's a compression wave
Speaker 1: in the air and that's cool because he says, oh,
Speaker 1: I already know how the math for waves works, right,
Speaker 1: I've seen waves in water. I've seen waves and other stuff.
Speaker 4: You can describe it with like equations, right, yeah, wavy equations.
Speaker 1: That's right, very solid, unwavy physics to describe waves. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of science that's gone into understanding waves.
Speaker 1: So if you can cram it into that box and say, oh,
Speaker 1: this is just another example of something we already know,
Speaker 1: then you're taking a huge leap forward. Right. So that's
Speaker 1: something people try to do is say like, look, can
Speaker 1: we describe this in terms of other things we know?
Speaker 4: So we need like, you know, we know about light,
Speaker 4: but we want to know how it behaves and what
Speaker 4: makes it work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just on a more general level, you try
Speaker 1: to see something new, you try to describe in terms
Speaker 1: of things you know, Like, say you taste a new
Speaker 1: kind of fruit and you be like, oh, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like a cherry and a little bit like
Speaker 1: an apple, and a little bit like you know, it's
Speaker 1: got a hint of smokiness to it or whatever.
Speaker 4: You know, You're like, it's a chapel.
Speaker 1: It's a chapel. How has nobody ever invented that the
Speaker 1: cherry apple chapel. Oh my gosh, somebody, if our lawyer
Speaker 1: is listening, get on that right away. Copyright that idea.
Speaker 4: I'll reserve ww dot chapel dot com. Up.
Speaker 1: That's right. So that's the basic idea is we have
Speaker 1: these things we've seen. You see something new, you don't
Speaker 1: want to create a whole new category. You want to
Speaker 1: fit into one of the existing categories.
Speaker 4: So we sort of knew about light. It came from
Speaker 4: the sun. It you know, if you light a fire,
Speaker 4: it spreads down into a room. And so we're like,
Speaker 4: what's going on? Like what what best describes how this
Speaker 4: light you know, comes from a source and bounces off
Speaker 4: the walls and stuff.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly, that's the question. And so we'd seen things
Speaker 1: like waves. So what do we mean when we say
Speaker 1: a wave, Like, how could a light be a wave? Well?
Speaker 4: How can anything be a wave?
Speaker 1: Yeah? How can anything be a wave? A wave is
Speaker 1: a funny thing because it's not a thing itself. It's
Speaker 1: a property of some medium, Like it's.
Speaker 4: The take a rip on something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, Like if you do the wave at
Speaker 1: a baseball game, you know, there's nothing to the wave itself.
Speaker 1: It's just a bunch of people moving up and down
Speaker 1: and waving their hands, right.
Speaker 4: Or like a sound wave is just like air molecules
Speaker 4: kind of bumping forward.
Speaker 1: That's right, yeah, exactly. Or a wave in the ocean
Speaker 1: is just it's an arrangement of the water, right, It's
Speaker 1: a way the water gets compressed and then stretched out
Speaker 1: and compressed and then gets stretched out. So that's an
Speaker 1: important thing about a wave is that it moves in
Speaker 1: this way through a medium.
Speaker 4: M Okay, so that's a wave. It's like a propagation,
Speaker 4: it's like a ripple through something. But then so then
Speaker 4: what would you call a particle? A particle is different
Speaker 4: than that.
Speaker 1: A particle is different than that, and it's a totally
Speaker 1: different kind of thing, you know, And to be a
Speaker 1: particle physicist, it's kind of odd. But the concept of
Speaker 1: a particle is not that really well defined, you know.
Speaker 1: But when I think of a particle, I think of
Speaker 1: taking matter and breaking it down to its smallest pieces.
Speaker 1: Like if something's made out of particles, it means that
Speaker 1: at its smallest level, it's made out of these little
Speaker 1: bits that can't be opt into smaller bits, and that
Speaker 1: they're localized. They're like small and contained. Right. If you
Speaker 1: discover that something is made of particles, you expect it
Speaker 1: to be like mostly empty space, but with these little
Speaker 1: dots of matter.
Speaker 4: Like you would take something and then you smash it
Speaker 4: to bit and just keep smashing, and at some point
Speaker 4: you're going to get to these little like baby balls
Speaker 4: or like little tiny pellets that you can't break down anymore.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, It's like seeing a picture on your
Speaker 1: computer screen and discovering it's made out of pixels, right,
Speaker 1: and that those pixels are the basic elements and they
Speaker 1: come together to make the whole picture. So figuring out
Speaker 1: that something is made of particles means that there's made
Speaker 1: of these these little bits that are not connected to
Speaker 1: each other, right, they're separated. So a wave and a
Speaker 1: particle in nature are totally different kinds of things. Right Now,
Speaker 1: water of course is made of particles, but can have
Speaker 1: waves in it, right.
Speaker 4: But I think maybe what's important here is that, you know,
Speaker 4: particles we tend to think of as little tiny it's
Speaker 4: they can bounce around, right and like go in a
Speaker 4: street line and then hit something else and then bounce back,
Speaker 4: or you know, kind of fly through space, right, in
Speaker 4: a discrete little package exactly.
Speaker 1: That's exactly the right way to say. It's a discrete
Speaker 1: little package. Right. So things that are made of particles
Speaker 1: we think of as being discrete little bits, and they
Speaker 1: they're broken up into these little pieces, and you're right,
Speaker 1: they move in straight lines. Right, Like you throw a rock,
Speaker 1: you roll a smooth ball across the surface, you expect
Speaker 1: it to move in a straight line.
Speaker 4: So that's kind of what we mean by a wave
Speaker 4: and a particle, that's right. Yeah, And so the question
Speaker 4: is like, is light a ripple on a medium? Is
Speaker 4: that what light is? Or is it like actual little
Speaker 4: things and move around in space?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: Does it have its own stuff to it? Right? Or
Speaker 1: is it just a way something else moves right? That's
Speaker 1: sort of another way to phrase the question.
Speaker 4: Right, And those are two pretty different pictures of reality, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: light could be little pellets flying around, or it could
Speaker 4: be some sort of ripple on a medium. To us,
Speaker 4: in our intuitive sense, it couldn't be anywhere different, right.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah. It's like you can't be a Democrat
Speaker 1: and a Republican, you know, just you have to pick one,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, if you vote it you can be
Speaker 1: or you could be neither. I suppose you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: both though, Yeah, that would be a violation of some
Speaker 1: election law not recommended to violate elections, right, that's right. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: speaking of political shouting matches, this one, this historical scientific
Speaker 1: shouting match, began all the way back with the Greeks, right, Democratus,
Speaker 1: he's the guy sort of the first atomist. He's the
Speaker 1: first person to look at the world and to say,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe everything's made out of tiny little bits,
Speaker 1: not just light, but also matter. And that was sort
Speaker 1: of the birth of that idea that maybe everything around
Speaker 1: us that seems macroscopic is made out of tiny little things,
Speaker 1: smaller than we can see. And you know, as usual,
Speaker 1: when somebody comes up with a good idea, they overextended.
Speaker 1: They're like, well, maybe if rocks are made out of stuff,
Speaker 1: then water is also made out of particles, and maybe
Speaker 1: even light is made out of particles. You know, at
Speaker 1: the time, seemed like a totally a crazy reach.
Speaker 4: And that makes sense, right, because light seems to go
Speaker 4: in a straight line, it seems to bounce off of things,
Speaker 4: So why couldn't light just be like little tiny little
Speaker 4: pellets that bounce around the room and then eventually hit
Speaker 4: your eye and then that's how you see something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it certainly seems to have some of those particle
Speaker 1: like properties, right, it moves in straight lines, it certainly
Speaker 1: would be going really really fast. At the time, people
Speaker 1: thought that light traveled instantly. Right. They thought that light
Speaker 1: instantaneously went from like the sun to the earth, or
Speaker 1: or if you started a fire, that the light would
Speaker 1: immediately illuminate the room. Now, we of course know that
Speaker 1: it just happens super duper crazy fast, too fast for
Speaker 1: those folks to ever measure, so it's almost like it's instantaneous.
Speaker 1: But they thought that these things just moved instantly through
Speaker 1: space and filled up the room. Okay, and I want
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Speaker 4: So initially we thought light was or the Greeks thought
Speaker 4: that light was a.
Speaker 1: Particle, right, And I think we have to qualify that
Speaker 1: because it makes the Greeks sound really smart. Just come
Speaker 1: up with this idea of atoms and all that stuff, and.
Speaker 4: You say this before you're really down on the Greeks.
Speaker 1: Well, I think people give the Greeks too much credit
Speaker 1: for that, because, as I've probably said to you before,
Speaker 1: the Greeks had lots and lots of ideas. You know,
Speaker 1: they had like thousands of these ideas about how the
Speaker 1: way the world works. And yeah, one of them was
Speaker 1: close to true. But like, if we're going to do
Speaker 1: some accounting, let's also remember the nine hundred and ninety
Speaker 1: nine ones that were totally off base, you know, and
Speaker 1: give them credit for those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, find that Greek we thought life was just little
Speaker 4: puppies and be like seeing you guys also thought there
Speaker 4: were puppies. You can't be that smart, that's right.
Speaker 1: But he's a cool idea, So give him credit for
Speaker 1: having that idea. I don't know what they were smoking
Speaker 1: when they came up with it, but I'd like to
Speaker 1: figure out where to find some. And then it was
Speaker 1: thousands of years later before people had another idea. It
Speaker 1: was a Descartes, the guy who's famous for you know,
Speaker 1: I think therefore I am he thought about He was
Speaker 1: one of the earliest scientists, not just philosopher, but a scientist,
Speaker 1: back in the day when you know, science really was
Speaker 1: part of philosophy, and he thought that light was waves.
Speaker 4: What made him think it was waves?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't think he had much justification for it.
Speaker 1: This is back in the early days when science wasn't
Speaker 1: really an empirical study where you didn't like go out
Speaker 1: and do experiments to test your hypothesis. It just made
Speaker 1: more sense to him for light to be like these
Speaker 1: wave like disturbances.
Speaker 4: Right, which kind of makes sense, right, Like if you
Speaker 4: have a speaker in a room emitting sound waves, it's
Speaker 4: not that different from like a light bulb in the
Speaker 4: middle of the room emitting light all around it. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's some things that light does that don't
Speaker 1: really that don't really seem consistent with particles, you know,
Speaker 1: like the way light bends through a lens, right, it's
Speaker 1: called we call in science, we call that refraction. You know,
Speaker 1: when light changes from going through air to glass, it
Speaker 1: bends in this weird way. That's something that's very common
Speaker 1: for waves, right.
Speaker 4: And a particle wouldn't bend inside of a lens.
Speaker 1: No, No, a particle that's definitely a wave like behavior, yeah, oh,
Speaker 1: not particle like behavior. And so Descartes saw that and
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, you know, we have optics, we have
Speaker 1: these lenses. So maybe light is a wave. But if
Speaker 1: light is a wave, then it opens this other question.
Speaker 1: What's doing the waving?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: I mean with sound, you know it's the air and
Speaker 1: the water waves. Obviously it's the water. But if light
Speaker 1: is a wave, then what is waving?
Speaker 4: Meaning? Like, if light is a ripple, what is it.
Speaker 1: A ripple of that's right? Yeah, what's doing the rippling? Right?
Speaker 1: If it's a wave, it has to be a wave
Speaker 1: in something, because a wave is just a description of
Speaker 1: some other form of matter rippling, right.
Speaker 4: It couldn't just be like stuff that we can't see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so you have to invent some stuff that
Speaker 1: we can't see. Right. So to explain light being a wave,
Speaker 1: you have to invent this universe filled with stuff. Or
Speaker 1: there has to be that stuff between us and the
Speaker 1: sun for example, right, which is a huge amount of
Speaker 1: this new stuff you're inventing. And if you're looking at
Speaker 1: the stars, there has to be that stuff between you
Speaker 1: and the stars. Right. So now we're talking about billions
Speaker 1: of miles of this new stuff, and Descartes, you know,
Speaker 1: didn't know. So he just gave it a name. He's
Speaker 1: called I don't even know how to pronounce it, but
Speaker 1: he called it plenum. And he thought, well, there must
Speaker 1: be if light is a wave, there must be some
Speaker 1: stuff that's doing the waving, and we'll just give it
Speaker 1: a name, and maybe we'll be right, and then we'll
Speaker 1: be famous forever.
Speaker 4: Isn't it is that different than the ether?
Speaker 1: It's similar in concept, right, it's a different idea, but
Speaker 1: it's similar in concept that like, if light is a wave,
Speaker 1: it must be waving through something, and we don't know
Speaker 1: what it is. We just invent something to and give
Speaker 1: it a name as a placeholder, so when later people
Speaker 1: do the hard work of actually discovering it, we'll still
Speaker 1: get credit.
Speaker 4: Okay, So it was a particle. Light was a particle,
Speaker 4: then was a wave, and then what happened.
Speaker 1: Well, then Newton came along, right, And Newton's a really
Speaker 1: smart guy, and everybody knows that he's famous for thinking
Speaker 1: about gravity, but he also liked to think about optics
Speaker 1: and lenses. And he thought for sure that light was
Speaker 1: a particle because he saw it moving in straight lines,
Speaker 1: and he saw distinct shadows. But you know, Newton also
Speaker 1: did a lot of experiments with optics. He studied prisms,
Speaker 1: and he saw light bending, and he saw light splitting
Speaker 1: into colors. And you can't explain that if light is
Speaker 1: a particle, but he tried. You know, he's like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe when a particle hits the glass, it gets some
Speaker 1: sort of weird sideways force and that makes it bend.
Speaker 1: But you know, that's not really an explanation. That's just
Speaker 1: sort of like a I don't really understand it. But
Speaker 1: maybe it's something like this.
Speaker 4: Like, if light is a particle, why does it split
Speaker 4: into the rainbow kind of thing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And you know this is again back in
Speaker 1: the day when empirical studies of science weren't the main
Speaker 1: way to answer questions. It was mostly thinking in your
Speaker 1: head about things that made sense to you, and then
Speaker 1: they would argue about them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: A lot of the way scientific disputes used to be
Speaker 1: resolved was people would argue about it and then say, well,
Speaker 1: that makes no sense, so it can't be true. And
Speaker 1: we know now, of course, that the universe doesn't always
Speaker 1: make sense to us. What's real isn't necessarily the things
Speaker 1: that we would have accepted as true or accepted as
Speaker 1: a reasonable way to describe the universe. But you know,
Speaker 1: if that's the way nature works, that's the way nature works,
Speaker 1: you have to accept it. But that's the sort of
Speaker 1: primacy of experimental results came later on. So back in
Speaker 1: the day, people just sort of used to argue for
Speaker 1: an explanation that made sense to them.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, it was kind of hard for them to
Speaker 4: build a particle collider, right.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, exactly, they didn't have the massive government
Speaker 1: funding to do that. These were men of leisure studying
Speaker 1: science and the spare time.
Speaker 4: In fact, it was called like natural philosophy, right, It
Speaker 4: wasn't called science at the time, was it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right exactly. All science grew out of philosophy.
Speaker 1: It was called these folks were natural philosophers. But you know,
Speaker 1: later on then people started doing experiments. And there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of French guys who did a bunch of
Speaker 1: experiments and some of some English folks, and they were
Speaker 1: studying how light behaved and refraction and reflection. And they
Speaker 1: saw it doing these things and they thought, there's no
Speaker 1: way Newton's right, this has to be a wave. You know,
Speaker 1: they saw things like interference patterns. Right. Interference patterns is
Speaker 1: when you have two waves and sometimes one is rippling
Speaker 1: up at the same time another one is rippling down. Right.
Speaker 1: So imagine, for example, you have a bathtub of water
Speaker 1: in front of you, and you slap it with two
Speaker 1: hands at once, right, each one is going to send
Speaker 1: waves out. And then when those end, those waves are
Speaker 1: either rippling up or rippling down. And when they reach
Speaker 1: each other, if they're both rippling up at the same time,
Speaker 1: then they constructively interfere to get a double wave. If
Speaker 1: they're both rippling down at the same time, they constructively
Speaker 1: interfere to get a double down wave. If one is
Speaker 1: rippling up and the other's rippling down, then then they
Speaker 1: cancel each other.
Speaker 4: Out right, And so you would see no light.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, And so you can do this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, in your bathtub, you can see interference patterns.
Speaker 1: And what happens if you have two sources like that,
Speaker 1: like one from each of your hands, is you get
Speaker 1: some areas where the waves are high, in some areas
Speaker 1: where the waves are low, in some areas where there
Speaker 1: are no waves. And so as you say, if you
Speaker 1: do it with light then you see these patterns of
Speaker 1: dark and light, these stripes.
Speaker 4: And you couldn't do that with particles, right, Like a
Speaker 4: particle wouldn't cancel another particle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no way to explain that with particles. People thought, well, look,
Speaker 1: this is something that waves do, and light is doing it,
Speaker 1: and there's no way to explain it with particles, So
Speaker 1: light must be a wave. Right. In fact, there's even
Speaker 1: famous cases where they said, well, you know, if light
Speaker 1: is a wave, then you know, if you set up
Speaker 1: this various experiment, you would get this crazy effect and
Speaker 1: so that's absurd and so it definitely can't be true.
Speaker 1: And then they went and did the experiment and saw
Speaker 1: the crazy wave effect and they're like, oh, that is true.
Speaker 1: You know, this is a I love that because it's
Speaker 1: the primacy of experimentalism, right, Like, go and check the data,
Speaker 1: Go and actually get some data and see what the
Speaker 1: universe tells you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like you're like, a doughnut can't possibly be a
Speaker 4: croissant at the same time, but it turns out that
Speaker 4: you can bake something called a cronat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I think that's a big debate in pastry
Speaker 1: science still though, Yeah, is it from a donut, like
Speaker 1: that's like a croissant, or is it a croissant that's
Speaker 1: like a donut.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm getting my degree in particle baking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the large pastry Collider. I'm looking forward to the
Speaker 1: construction of that project.
Speaker 4: But that's kind of what you mean. It's like you
Speaker 4: people don't think it's possible until they actually see it.
Speaker 4: And waves and light has been doing this to people
Speaker 4: for hundreds of years, or they're like, they can't possibly
Speaker 4: be doing this, or they can't it can't possibly be
Speaker 4: doing that, but it just keeps doing all these weird things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And that was the experiment it's called the
Speaker 1: double slit experiment, the one that really convinced people that
Speaker 1: light is a wave because they've shown a strong light
Speaker 1: and they had just two little narrow slits which act
Speaker 1: like as sources like slapping your hands in the bath
Speaker 1: to water, and then on a screen behind it, they
Speaker 1: saw these interference patterns, right, is that you could definitely
Speaker 1: only get if light was a wave. And so that
Speaker 1: was the early eighteen hundreds and everybody was absolutely certain
Speaker 1: light was totally a wave. The question was settled. We
Speaker 1: knew forever light was a wave. And we still didn't
Speaker 1: know what was it waving through.
Speaker 4: But how did they explain all those particle experiments?
Speaker 1: Well, this was before we even really knew about particles, right,
Speaker 1: No real particles had been discovered at this point. With
Speaker 1: this idea from the Greeks of thousands of years ago
Speaker 1: that maybe things were made out of particles, and chemistry
Speaker 1: was getting warmed up, and you know, people are starting
Speaker 1: to think about atoms and molecules and stuff, but they
Speaker 1: hadn't really seen any actual particles yet. And it was
Speaker 1: decades later when the electron was discovered that people started
Speaker 1: to think about the particle model again. But you know,
Speaker 1: the wave theory was definitely ascended, right. Everybody definitely looked
Speaker 1: at these double slit experiments and saw light doing all
Speaker 1: this wavy stuff, and they were sure that light was
Speaker 1: a wave.
Speaker 4: Now did people extend that to other things, Like, you know,
Speaker 4: they thought, oh, light is this weird wavy thing. But
Speaker 4: surely us, we're made out of little tiny atoms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good question. I wonder if people thought, hm,
Speaker 1: light's a wave, maybe we're a wave too, right, yeah?
Speaker 4: Or like everything's just like a wave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, probably not, because nobody thought that light had any
Speaker 1: mass to it, right, whereas we definitely know that we
Speaker 1: have mass, right, we feel pretty heavy sometimes after a
Speaker 1: big meal. Even before the discovery particles, though, there was
Speaker 1: a huge advance in the theory of light which was
Speaker 1: a Scottish guy named Maxwell. He was working on electricity
Speaker 1: and magnetism, and he put together all these equations to
Speaker 1: describe electricity magnetism, and he just sort of wrote them
Speaker 1: down in a new way. This is like the way
Speaker 1: you could do theoretical physics back in the days. You
Speaker 1: just take existing ideas and you find a new way
Speaker 1: to write them down. But he wrote them down in
Speaker 1: this way that looked like the mathematics of a wave.
Speaker 1: We have this equation. It's called a wave equation, and
Speaker 1: it describes how waves move through a.
Speaker 4: Medium, meaning like it could be described by equations that
Speaker 4: look like sine waves and cosine waves. Right, I mean,
Speaker 4: just in case anyone remembers high school math, that's kind
Speaker 4: of what we mean by mathematical equations. So you can
Speaker 4: describe it as a sine wave or as cosine wave, right.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, The solution to these equations are sine
Speaker 1: waves and cosine waves. These are differential equations to describe
Speaker 1: how things move through the medium. And if things follow
Speaker 1: these equations, then they're waves, right, okay. And so he
Speaker 1: looked at the equations for electricity and for magnetism and
Speaker 1: he rewrote them and he realized, you can rewrite them
Speaker 1: in a way that looks just like the wave equation. Right,
Speaker 1: So he said, oh, electricity magnetism has the same equation
Speaker 1: as waves moving through water or waves moving through air.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if you write it in terms of
Speaker 1: this wave equation, you can pull out what the speed
Speaker 1: of those waves must be. And the speed that he
Speaker 1: pulled out from this from these equations was the speed
Speaker 1: of light. So he had this moment of epiphany. He
Speaker 1: must have been like in his office late one night,
Speaker 1: rearranged these equations and realized, oh, my gosh, light is
Speaker 1: a wave, and it's a wave of electromagnetism.
Speaker 4: So like a light bulb turned on on top of
Speaker 4: his head, emitting waves.
Speaker 1: Exactly the first appropriate light bulb ever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so then that seems pretty definitive. The double slit
Speaker 4: experiment shows that light interferes with itself. And also this
Speaker 4: guy figured out that it's mathematically describable by sine ways.
Speaker 4: And cosine waves right.
Speaker 1: Right right, That light is waves of electromagnetism, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So then it all seems really nice and tidy. But
Speaker 1: then the particle revolution comes, right. People discover the electron,
Speaker 1: people discover the neutron, people discovering all these particles. But
Speaker 1: then they were doing experiments where they were shining light
Speaker 1: onto materials and trying to get it to kick off electrons.
Speaker 1: So you shine a really bright light at something and
Speaker 1: you hope that some of the electrons in the material
Speaker 1: absorb that light and get enough energy to be free
Speaker 1: right to run away, and so this is called the
Speaker 1: photoelectric effect. You shine light at something and you measure
Speaker 1: the electrons that come off. So what they saw in
Speaker 1: this experiment only made sense if the energy of the
Speaker 1: light comes in little packets rather than a continuous stream
Speaker 1: like waves. So they turned up the intensity of the
Speaker 1: light and they made it brighter, but that didn't increase
Speaker 1: the energy of the electrons that were coming off, which
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense if it's a wave. It only makes
Speaker 1: sense if photons come in little packets, so that increasing
Speaker 1: the intensity of the light means more photons, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't give more energy to any one. Electron because each
Speaker 1: electron can only absorb one photon. And nobody understood this
Speaker 1: at all. This made no sense to anybody. It was
Speaker 1: a huge puzzle. We totally believe that it acted like
Speaker 1: a wave. We had the double slit experiment told it
Speaker 1: was a wave. Maxwell's equations told us it was wave.
Speaker 1: But then we had the photoelectric effect, which didn't quite
Speaker 1: make sense to anybody. Okay, and then Einstein said, well,
Speaker 1: what if light comes in these little packets like you
Speaker 1: were saying before, What if light is not this continuous
Speaker 1: stream of energy like a wave is right, a wave
Speaker 1: is continuous stream of energy. What if it comes in
Speaker 1: these little bits? And that explained everything if you thought
Speaker 1: that light was came in these little packets, It explained
Speaker 1: the photo electric effect, explained these all these other mysteries
Speaker 1: in physics, and that was the birth of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 4: Did he think that maybe it was little packets of waves?
Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean? Like little short bursts
Speaker 4: of ripples.
Speaker 7: You know?
Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 4: Could that explain how it's both things that run through
Speaker 4: his brain?
Speaker 1: Yes? Absolutely, I think that's probably the first way he
Speaker 1: thought about it, is like a little localized ripple, right,
Speaker 1: like a little Yeah, that's the best way to put it,
Speaker 1: A little localized ripple, like the way you can send
Speaker 1: a little ripple of water, Yeah, through a swimming pool,
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 4: Like a chirp, or like a little sound burst.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like a little chirp. But it's strange because
Speaker 1: you know, you can make a chirp of any size.
Speaker 1: You can make a big one, a little one, a
Speaker 1: long one, a fat one. But light, for some reason,
Speaker 1: wanted to come only these in these little distinct chirps
Speaker 1: of a specific size, and the size of those churps
Speaker 1: was controlled by their color or their frequency. And so
Speaker 1: that was the birth of quantum mechanics, which we could
Speaker 1: spend a whole other podcast talking about. But it was
Speaker 1: the first clue that maybe light did come in these
Speaker 1: distinct little packages.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's talk about that, But first, let's take a
Speaker 4: quick break.
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Speaker 1: And that's what we talked about, Like what is a particle?
Speaker 1: It's a distinct little package. And then here's the part
Speaker 1: that blew my mind is that then they went back
Speaker 1: and they did that double slit experiment again, but they
Speaker 1: slowed it down. Instead of shining a really big beam
Speaker 1: of light, they just shown one photon at a time, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: because they wanted to see what's going to happen. Right,
Speaker 1: if light comes in these little packets, How does that
Speaker 1: explain the interference effect? How can light interfere if it's
Speaker 1: a particle?
Speaker 4: So like, instead of like pointing the hose of water
Speaker 4: at these two little holes and just seeing what happens
Speaker 4: on the other side, they were throwing one droplet of water.
Speaker 1: In time, yes, exactly, And what they expected to see
Speaker 1: was that there would be no interference pattern, right, because
Speaker 1: the interference comes from having two sources.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: You have interference when you have two waves that are
Speaker 1: either adding up or canceling out.
Speaker 4: Meaning like a huge stream of light is going through
Speaker 4: these two little slits. Then the two little slits act
Speaker 4: like little sources, like little sorts of ripples, which can
Speaker 4: cancel ze exactly. But if you throw one drop at time,
Speaker 4: it's either going to go in one slit or it's
Speaker 4: going to go on the other slid, right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so the should be nothing to interfere, right,
Speaker 1: So that's what they expected. But what they what they
Speaker 1: saw blew their minds.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: What happens if you slow the experiment down, you send
Speaker 1: one photon at a time, is that you still get
Speaker 1: an interference pattern. It's just that it builds up piece
Speaker 1: by piece. So you throw one photon through and it
Speaker 1: lands someplace on the screen, Throw another photon through, it
Speaker 1: lands somewhere else on the screen. After you add up
Speaker 1: a million photons, you rebuild the original interference pattern you saw.
Speaker 4: That's crazy.
Speaker 1: What. Yeah, light is a particle, but it's acting like
Speaker 1: a wave. Right, how is that? How can that even be? Right?
Speaker 4: It's not just that it's like it's a particle that's
Speaker 4: acting like a wave, as if it was in a
Speaker 4: huge stream of other particles.
Speaker 1: Right, that's right, And this blew everybody's mind. And the answer,
Speaker 1: of course, is that light is a particle. But like
Speaker 1: every kind of matter, like every particle, how it moves
Speaker 1: is governed by mathematics of wave equations. So every particle
Speaker 1: carries with it's some quantum mechanical wave that determines where
Speaker 1: it goes. But what was happening in that experiment was
Speaker 1: that a particle photon was approaching the experiment and then
Speaker 1: it could either go through the left hand side or
Speaker 1: the right hand side slit right, And because it's quantum mechanical,
Speaker 1: it did both. It had a chance to do both,
Speaker 1: and what was interfering was the probability to go through
Speaker 1: the left slit or the right slit.
Speaker 4: So that's interesting. I don't think i've heard that explanation
Speaker 4: before that it's a particle and a wave in the
Speaker 4: sense that it is a particle, but it moves according
Speaker 4: to wave equations.
Speaker 1: Yes, everything moves according to wave equations. It's just that
Speaker 1: the wavelength for things depends on how much energy they have.
Speaker 1: So that was this guy de Brogueli. He came up
Speaker 1: with this equation and maybe heard the expression to broguely wavelength.
Speaker 4: I've heard the expression wavelength. That seems to be a.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everything is wavelengths. We were making fun of that guy.
Speaker 1: Turns out he was right, oh twist ending, No, everything
Speaker 1: has a wavelength, right, you can describe the motion of
Speaker 1: anything in terms of a wave. Now, the wavelength depends
Speaker 1: on the mass and the momentum, and for most things
Speaker 1: like me or you or cantelope, the wavelength of its
Speaker 1: quantum mechanical wave function is tiny, and so you can't
Speaker 1: even notice. Right, the wave effects of you and your
Speaker 1: son walking down the hallway and interfering with each other
Speaker 1: are basically negligible. But on the scale of particles, these
Speaker 1: wave functions interfere with each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a crazy thought that you know. We I
Speaker 4: think people think quantum is something that doesn't affect their lives,
Speaker 4: but quantum ideas and concepts are everywhere, right, Like you
Speaker 4: have a sort of like a quantum superposition, or you
Speaker 4: you're not really there. You sort of there's a cloud
Speaker 4: of you that is.
Speaker 1: I'm not really here, I'm just an AI on the internet.
Speaker 1: But that's that's differently cloud. Yeah, there is this quantum
Speaker 1: mechanical certainty and everything.
Speaker 4: Guess yeah, yeah, it's just that you can't notice.
Speaker 1: That really blew people's minds. This concept that like, okay,
Speaker 1: light is a particle, but it sort of acts like
Speaker 1: a wave. We can use these wave equations to describe it.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's another layer to that experiment which
Speaker 1: is even crazier, right, which is if what's interfering is
Speaker 1: the probability to go through the left slit or the
Speaker 1: right slit right. Then when the when the photon approaches
Speaker 1: the experiment, it can go through one or the other.
Speaker 1: The interference pattern comes from the uncertainty of which it's
Speaker 1: going to go through. So what you can do is
Speaker 1: you can add a little detector to one slit that
Speaker 1: like gives you a ping if it goes through that
Speaker 1: slit right, so you know for sure if it goes
Speaker 1: through one slit or the other. If you do that,
Speaker 1: the interference pattern disappears. WHOA Why does it disappear? It
Speaker 1: disappears because the interference only came from the interference of
Speaker 1: the possibility of the particle to go through the left
Speaker 1: slit or the right slit, our lack of knowledge. Once
Speaker 1: you know it goes through the right slide of left slit,
Speaker 1: there's no more uncertainty. There's nothing to interfere. It just
Speaker 1: goes through the left or it goes through the right.
Speaker 4: It's like you're throwing a boxes full of cats that
Speaker 4: are either dead or alive, and you see what happens
Speaker 4: on the other side. It's different if you take a
Speaker 4: peek inside the box before it gets there.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly, and no cats were harmed in the making
Speaker 1: of this podcast. I now feel energs to point out
Speaker 1: that's sort of where we are today, is that we
Speaker 1: know that light is a particle and then it comes
Speaker 1: in these little discrete packets become photons, right, Yeah, But
Speaker 1: we also know that, like everything else, light is determined
Speaker 1: by how its way you function moves. Every particle and
Speaker 1: every object has this way you function, and how it
Speaker 1: moves is controlled by wave equations.
Speaker 4: It's not like it's both a particle and a wave
Speaker 4: and people don't really know which one it is, or
Speaker 4: people are still confused about them. But it sort of
Speaker 4: sounds like you're not that confused about it, right, It
Speaker 4: sort of sounds like you know it's a particle, but
Speaker 4: it moves around like a wave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's still confusing. I mean, I think you could.
Speaker 1: It's totally reasonable to say it's both. It's a particle
Speaker 1: but it acts like a wave. Right, It's also totally
Speaker 1: reasonable to say it's neither. It's not a particle, it's
Speaker 1: not a wave. It's something else. It's something weird, something
Speaker 1: totally strange, we've never seen before. It's a war we
Speaker 1: can or a pave you are on fire.
Speaker 4: I am simple spelling, but that's that's a joke.
Speaker 1: But it's also serious because sometimes we discover things which
Speaker 1: are unlike anything else we've seen, and how do you
Speaker 1: describe them?
Speaker 4: I meaning we should stop using these words. We should
Speaker 4: maybe more than new word to describe what it is,
Speaker 4: because it's not not described by either word.
Speaker 1: Particle, that's right, it's a chapel, it's a cherry apple combination.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's not call it a particle or a wave.
Speaker 4: Let's just make up any word that embodies these two
Speaker 4: ways to behave that's right.
Speaker 1: But here we've discovered something which is different from anything
Speaker 1: in our microscopic world. There's nothing in our world particles, waves,
Speaker 1: little puppies. That is a good analogy for what light is.
Speaker 1: So we have to try to sort of describe it
Speaker 1: in terms of sometimes it's like this, sometimes like this.
Speaker 1: My personal belief is that it's it's not like anything else,
Speaker 1: and that these are approximations. But you know, like we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier, you can be different contradictory things
Speaker 1: like how would you describe yourself? You know, sometimes your husband,
Speaker 1: sometimes your father, sometimes you're a cartoonist. Sometimes you're just
Speaker 1: a sleep you know. Like all these things describe you,
Speaker 1: they're contradictory. There are different facets of who you are
Speaker 1: at your core, and none of them define you right.
Speaker 4: Right, But if you don't happen to have the right label,
Speaker 4: you make up an you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, Yes, we need a new thing.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Light is definitely its own weird kind of thing.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, until next time.
Speaker 1: If you still have a question after listening to all
Speaker 1: these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or
Speaker 1: email us at Feedback at Danielandorge dot com. When you
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