Einstein predicted that the ejected electron will have a kinetic energy According to Einstein, each photon has an energy \(E = h\nu \), in contrast to the classical case where the energy of the photoelectron depends on the intensity of the light. Einstein realized that there were direct tests of his photon hypothesis, one of which is the photo-electric effect. This was a revolutionary concept that returned to Newton’s corpuscle theory of light. In order to reproduce Planck’s prediction, Einstein had to treat black-body radiation as if it consisted of a gas of photons, each photon having energy \(E = h\nu \). However, Maxwell had convinced physicists that light was a wave phenomena interference plus diffraction effects were convincing manifestations of the wave-like properties of light. Newton believed that light involved corpuscles, and Hamilton developed the Hamilton-Jacobi theory seeking to describe light in terms of the corpuscle theory. Planck demanded that light of frequency \(\nu\) be packaged in quanta whose energies were multiples of \(h\nu \), but Planck never thought that light would have particle-like behavior. Einstein uncovered an inconsistency in Planck’s derivation of the black body spectral distribution in that it assumed the statistical part of the energy is quantized, whereas the electromagnetic radiation assumed Maxwell’s equations with oscillator energies being continuous. It is remarkable to realize that he developed these three revolutionary theories in one year, when he was only 26 years old. In 1905, Einstein predicted the existence of the photon, derived the theory of specific heat, as well as deriving the Theory of Special Relativity. It was the new generation physicists, like Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Schrödinger, and Dirac, who developed Planck’s hypothesis leading to the revolutionary quantum theory. The older generation physicists initially refused to believe Planck’s hypothesis which underlies quantum theory. The assumption that energy was exchanged in bundles hinted that the classical laws of physics were inadequate in the microscopic domain. By making this extreme assumption, in an act of desperation, Planck was able to reproduce the experimental black body radiation spectrum. That is, Planck assumed that energy comes in discrete bundles of energy equal to \(h\nu\) which are called quanta. \) \(J \cdot s\) was the best fit parameter of the interpolation.
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