1 the Principle of Wave–Particle Duality: an Overview
3 1 The Principle of Wave–Particle Duality: An Overview 1.1 Introduction In the year 1900, physics entered a period of deep crisis as a number of peculiar phenomena, for which no classical explanation was possible, began to appear one after the other, starting with the famous problem of blackbody radiation. By 1923, when the “dust had settled,” it became apparent that these peculiarities had a common explanation. They revealed a novel fundamental principle of nature that wascompletelyatoddswiththeframeworkofclassicalphysics:thecelebrated principle of wave–particle duality, which can be phrased as follows. The principle of wave–particle duality: All physical entities have a dual character; they are waves and particles at the same time. Everything we used to regard as being exclusively a wave has, at the same time, a corpuscular character, while everything we thought of as strictly a particle behaves also as a wave. The relations between these two classically irreconcilable points of view—particle versus wave—are , h, E = hf p = (1.1) or, equivalently, E h f = ,= . (1.2) h p In expressions (1.1) we start off with what we traditionally considered to be solely a wave—an electromagnetic (EM) wave, for example—and we associate its wave characteristics f and (frequency and wavelength) with the corpuscular charac- teristics E and p (energy and momentum) of the corresponding particle. Conversely, in expressions (1.2), we begin with what we once regarded as purely a particle—say, an electron—and we associate its corpuscular characteristics E and p with the wave characteristics f and of the corresponding wave.
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