The Elegant Universe (15 page)

The person carrying pennies begins by tossing a few down, but this is far too meagre a sum for any of the children to be able to afford the departure fee. And because there is an essentially “infinite” sea of children all ferociously fighting in a turbulent tumult for the falling money, even if the penny-entrusted adult throws enormous numbers down, no individual child will come anywhere near collecting the 85 he or she needs to pay the guard. The same is true for the adults carrying nickels, dimes, and quarters. Although each tosses down a staggeringly large total amount of money, any single child is lucky if he or she gets even one coin (most get nothing at all) and certainly no child collects the 85 cents necessary to leave. But then, when the adult carrying dollars starts throwing them down—even comparatively tiny sums, dollar by single dollar—those lucky children who catch a single bill are able to leave immediately. Notice, though, that even as this adult loosens up and throws down barrels of dollar bills, the number of children who are able to leave increases enormously, but each has exactly 15 cents left after paying the guard. This is true regardless of the total number of dollars tossed.

Here is what all this has to do with the photoelectric effect. Based on the experimental data reviewed above, Einstein suggested incorporating Planck’s lumpy picture of wave energy into a new description of light. A light beam, according to Einstein, should actually be thought of as a stream of tiny packets—tiny particles of light—which were ultimately christened photons by the chemist Gilbert Lewis (an idea we made use of in our example of the light clock of Chapter 2). To get a sense of scale, according to this particle view of light, a typical one-hundred-watt bulb emits about a hundred billion billion (1020) photons per second. Einstein used this new conception to suggest a microscopic mechanism underlying the photoelectric effect: An electron is knocked off a metallic surface, he proposed, if it gets hit by a sufficiently energetic photon. And what determines the energy of an individual photon? To explain the experimental data, Einstein followed Planck’s lead and proposed that the energy of each photon is proportional to the frequency of the light wave (with the proportionality factor being Planck’s constant).

Now, like the children’s minimum departure fee, the electrons in a metal must be jostled by a photon possessing a certain minimum energy in order to be kicked off the surface. (As with the children fighting for money, it is extremely unlikely that any one electron gets hit by more than one photon—most don’t get hit at all.) But if the impinging light beam’s frequency is too low, its individual photons will lack the punch necessary to eject electrons. Just as no children can afford to leave regardless of the huge total number of coins the adults shower upon them, no electrons are jostled free regardless of the huge total energy embodied in the impinging light beam, if its frequency (and thus the energy of its individual photons) is too low.

But just as children are able to leave the warehouse as soon as the monetary denomination showered upon them gets large enough, electrons will be knocked off the surface as soon as the frequency of the light shone on them—its energy denomination—gets high enough. Moreover, just as the dollar-entrusted adult increases the total money thrown down by increasing the number of individual bills tossed, the total intensity of a light beam of a chosen frequency is increased by increasing the number of photons it contains. And just as more dollars result in more children being able to leave, more photons result in more electrons being hit and knocked clear off the surface. But notice that the leftover energy that each of these electrons has after ripping free of the surface depends solely on the energy of the photon that hits it—and this is determined by the frequency of the light beam, not its total intensity. Just as children leave the basement with 15 cents no matter how many dollar bills are thrown down, each electron leaves the surface with the same energy—and hence the same speed—regardless of the total intensity of the impinging light. More total money simply means more children can leave; more total energy in the light beam simply means more electrons are knocked free. If we want children to leave the basement with more money, we must increase the monetary denomination tossed down; if we want electrons to leave the surface with greater speed, we must increase the frequency of the impinging light beam—that is, we must increase the energy denomination of the photons we shine on the metallic surface.

This is precisely in accord with the experimental data. The frequency of the light (its color) determines the speed of the ejected electrons; the total intensity of the light determines the number of ejected electrons. And so Einstein showed that Planck’s guess of lumpy energy actually reflects a fundamental feature of electromagnetic waves: They are composed of particles—photons—that are little bundles, or quanta, of light. The lumpiness of the energy embodied by such waves is due to their being composed of lumps.

Einstein’s insight represented great progress. But, as we shall now see, the story is not as tidy as it might appear.

Is It a Wave or Is It a Particle?

Everyone knows that water—and hence water waves—are composed of a huge number of water molecules. So is it really surprising that light waves are also composed of a huge number of particles, namely photons? It is. But the surprise is in the details. You see, more than three hundred years ago Newton proclaimed that light consisted of a stream of particles, so the idea is not exactly new. However, some of Newton’s colleagues, most notably the Dutch physicist Christian Huygens, disagreed with him and argued that light is a wave. The debate raged but ultimately experiments carried out by the English physicist Thomas Young in the early 1800s showed that Newton was wrong.

A version of Young’s experimental setup—known as the double-slit experiment—is schematically illustrated in Figure 4.3. Feynman was fond of saying that all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of this single experiment, so it’s well worth discussing. As we see from Figure 4.3, light is shone on a thin solid barrier in which two slits are cut. A photographic plate records the light that gets through the slits—brighter areas of the photograph indicate more incident light. The experiment consists of comparing the images on photographic plates that result when either or both of the slits in the barrier are kept open and the light source is turned on.

If the left slit is covered and the right slit is open, the photograph looks like that shown in Figure 4.4. This makes good sense, since the light that hits the photographic plate must pass through the only open slit and will therefore be concentrated around the right part of the photograph. Similarly, if the right slit is covered and the left slit open, the photograph will look like that in Figure 4.5. If both slits are open, Newton’s particle picture of light leads to the prediction that the photographic plate will look like that in Figure 4.6, an amalgam of Figures 4.4 and 4.5. In essence, if you think of Newton’s corpuscles of light as if they were little pellets you fire at the wall, the ones that get through will be concentrated in the two areas that line up with the two slits. The wave picture of light, on the contrary, leads to a very different prediction for what happens when both slits are open. Let’s see this.

Imagine for a moment that rather than dealing with light waves we use water waves. The result we will find is the same, but water is easier to think about. When water waves strike the barrier, outgoing circular water waves emerge from each slit, much like those created by throwing a pebble into a pond, as illustrated in Figure 4.7. (It is simple to try this using a cardboard barrier with two slits in a pan of water.) As the waves emerging from each slit overlap with each other, something quite interesting happens. If two wave peaks overlap, the height of the water wave at that point increases: It’s the sum of the heights of the two individual peaks. If two wave troughs overlap, the depth of the water depression at that point is similarly increased. And finally, if a wave peak emerging from one slit overlaps with a wave trough emerging from the other, they cancel each other out. (In fact, this is the idea behind fancy noise-eliminating headphones—they measure the shape of the incoming sound wave and then produce another whose shape is exactly “opposite,” leading to a cancellation of the undesired noise.) In between these extreme overlaps—peaks with peaks, troughs with troughs, and peaks with troughs—are a host of partial height augmentations and cancellations. If you and a slew of companions form a line of little boats parallel to the barrier and you each declare how severely you are jostled by the resulting water wave as it passes, the result will look something like that shown on the far right of Figure 4.7. Locations of significant jostling are where wave peaks (or troughs) from each slit coincide. Regions of minimal or no jostling are where peaks from one slit coincide with troughs from the other, resulting in a cancellation.

Since the photographic plate records how much it is “Jostled” by the incoming light, exactly the same reasoning applied to the wave picture of a light beam tells us that when both slits are open the photograph will look like that in Figure 4.8. The brightest areas in Figure 4.8 are where light-wave peaks (or troughs) from each slit coincide. Dark areas are where wave peaks from one slit coincide with wave troughs from the other, resulting in a cancellation. The sequence of light and dark bands is known as an interference pattern. This photograph is significantly different from that shown in Figure 4.6, and hence there is a concrete experiment to distinguish between the particle and the wave pictures of light. Young carried out a version of this experiment and his results matched Figure 4.8, thereby confirming the wave picture. Newton’s corpuscular view was defeated (although it took quite some time before physicists accepted this). The prevailing wave view of light was subsequently put on a mathematically firm foundation by Maxwell.

But Einstein, the man who brought down Newton’s revered theory of gravity, seems now to have resurrected Newton’s particle model of light by his introduction of photons. Of course, we still face the same question: How can a particle perspective account for the interference pattern shown in Figure 4.8? At first blush you might make the following suggestion. Water is composed of H2O molecules—the “particles” of water. Nevertheless, when a lot of these molecules stream along with one another they can produce water waves, with the attendant interference properties illustrated in Figure 4.7. And so, it might seem reasonable to guess that wave properties, such as interference patterns, can arise from a particle picture of light provided a huge number of photons, the particles of light, are involved.

In reality, though, the microscopic world is far more subtle. Even if the intensity of the light source in Figure 4.8 is turned down and down finally to the point where individual photons are being fired one by one at the barrier—say at the rate of one every ten seconds—the resulting photographic plate will still look like that in Figure 4.8: So long as we wait long enough for a huge number of these separate bundles of light to make it through the slits and to each be recorded by a single dot where they hit the photographic plate, these dots will build up to form the image of an interference pattern, the image in Figure 4.8. This is astounding. How can individual photon particles that sequentially pass through the screen and separately hit the photographic plate conspire to produce the bright and dark bands of interfering waves? Conventional reasoning tells us that each and every photon passes through either the left slit or the right slit and we would therefore expect to find the pattern shown in Figure 4.6. But we don’t.

If you are not bowled over by this fact of nature, it means that either you have seen it before and have become blasé or the description so far has not been sufficiently vivid. So, in case it’s the latter, let’s describe it again, but in a slightly different way. You close off the left slit and fire the photons one by one at the barrier. Some get through, some don’t. The ones that do create an image on the photographic plate, dot by single dot, which looks like that in Figure 4.4. You then run the experiment again with a new photographic plate, but this time you open both slits. Naturally enough, you think that this will only increase the number of photons that pass through the slits in the barrier and hit the photographic plate, thereby exposing the film to more total light than in your first run of the experiment. But when you later examine the image produced, you find that not only are there places on the photographic plate that were dark in the first experiment and are now bright, as expected, there are also places on the photographic plate that were bright in your first experiment but are now dark, as in Figure 4.8. By increasing the number of individual photons that hit the photographic plate you have decreased the brightness in, certain areas. Somehow, temporally separated, individual particulate photons are able to cancel each other out. Think about how crazy this is: Photons that would have passed through the right slit and hit the film in one of the dark bands in Figure 4.8 fail to do so when the left slit is opened (which is why the band is now dark). But how in the world can a tiny bundle of light that passes through one slit be at all affected by whether or not the other slit is open? As Feynman noted, it’s as strange as if you fire a machine gun at the screen, and when both slits are open, independent, separately fired bullets somehow cancel one another out, leaving a pattern of unscathed positions on the target—positions that are hit when only one slit in the barrier is open.

Such experiments show that Einstein’s particles of light are quite different from Newton’s. Somehow photons—although they are particles—embody wave-like features of light as well. The fact that the energy of these particles is determined by a wave-like feature—frequency—is the first clue that a strange union is occurring. But the photoelectric effect and the double-slit experiment really bring the lesson home. The photoelectric effect shows that light has particle properties. The double-slit experiment shows that light manifests the interference properties of waves. Together they show that light has both wave-like and particle-like properties. The microscopic world demands that we shed our intuition that something is either a wave or a particle and embrace the possibility that it is both. It is here that Feynman’s pronouncement that “nobody understands quantum mechanics” comes to the fore. We can utter words such as “wave-particle duality.” We can translate these words into a mathematical formalism that describes real-world experiments with amazing accuracy. But it is extremely hard to understand at a deep, intuitive level this dazzling feature of the microscopic world.