An illustration on how light wor

Once Maxwell introduced the concept of electromagnetic waves, everything clicked into place. Scientists now could develop a complete working model of light using terms and concepts, such as wavelength and frequency, based on the structure and function of waves. According to that model, light waves come in many sizes. The size of a wave is measured as its wavelength, which is the distance between any two corresponding points on successive waves, usually peak to peak or trough to trough. The wavelengths of the light we can see range from 400 to 700 nanometers (or billionths of a meter). But the full range of wavelengths included in the definition of electromagnetic radiation extends from 0.1 nanometers, as in gamma rays, to centimeters and meters, as in radio waves.

Light waves also come in many frequencies. The frequency is the number of waves that pass a point in space during any time interval, usually one second. We measure it in units of cycles (waves) per second, or hertz. The frequency of visible light is referred to as color, and ranges from 430 trillion hertz, seen as red, to 750 trillion hertz, seen as violet. Again, the full range of frequencies extends beyond the visible portion, from less than 3 billion hertz, as in radio waves, to greater than 3 billion billion hertz (3 x 1019), as in gamma rays.

The amount of energy in a light wave is proportionally related to its frequency: High frequency light has high energy; low frequency light has low energy. So, gamma rays have the most energy (part of what makes them so dangerous to humans), and radio waves have the least. Of visible light, violet has the most energy and red the least. The whole range of frequencies and energies, shown in the accompanying figure, is known as the electromagnetic spectrum. Note that the figure isn’t drawn to scale and that visible light occupies only one-thousandth of a percent of the spectrum.

This might be the end of the discussion, except that Albert Einstein couldn’t let speeding light waves lie. His work in the early 20th century resurrected the old idea that light, just maybe, was a particle after all.
Maxwell’s theoretical treatment of electromagnetic radiation, including its description of light waves, was so elegant and predictive that many physicists in the 1890s thought that there was nothing more to say about light and how it worked. Then, on Dec. 14, 1900, Max Planck came along and introduced a stunningly simple, yet strangely unsettling, concept: that light must carry energy in discrete quantities. Those quantities, he proposed, must be units of the basic energy increment, hf, where h is a universal constant now known as Planck’s constant and f is the frequency of the radiation.

Albert Einstein advanced Planck’s theory in 1905 when he studied the photoelectric effect. First, he began by shining ultraviolet light on the surface of a metal. When he did this, he was able to detect electrons being emitted from the surface. This was Einstein’s explanation: If the energy in light comes in bundles, then one can think of light as containing tiny lumps, or photons. When these photons strike a metal surface, they act like billiard balls, transferring their energy to electrons, which become dislodged from their “parent” atoms. Once freed, the electrons move along the metal or get ejected from the surface.

The particle theory of light had returned — with a vengeance. Next, Niels Bohr applied Planck’s ideas to refine the model of an atom. Earlier scientists had demonstrated that atoms consist of positively charged nuclei surrounded by electrons orbiting like planets, but they couldn’t explain why electrons didn’t simply spiral into the nucleus. In 1913, Bohr proposed that electrons exist in discrete orbits based on their energy. When an electron jumps from one orbit to a lower orbit, it gives off energy in the form of a photon.

The quantum theory of light — the idea that light exists as tiny packets, or particles, called photons — slowly began to emerge. Our understanding of the physical world would no longer be the same.
Wave-Particle Duality
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At first, physicists were reluctant to accept the dual nature of light. After all, many of us humans like to have one right answer. But Einstein paved the way in 1905 by embracing wave-particle duality. We’ve already discussed the photoelectric effect, which led Einstein to describe light as a photon. Later that year, however, he added a twist to the story in a paper introducing special relativity. In this paper, Einstein treated light as a continuous field of waves — an apparent contradiction to his description of light as a stream of particles. Yet that was part of his genius. He willingly accepted the strange nature of light and chose whichever attribute best addressed the problem he was trying to solve.

Today, physicists accept the dual nature of light. In this modern view, they define light as a collection of one or more photons propagating through space as electromagnetic waves. This definition, which combines light’s wave and particle nature, makes it possible to rethink Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment in this way: Light travels away from a source as an electromagnetic wave. When it encounters the slits, it passes through and divides into two wave fronts. These wave fronts overlap and approach the screen. At the moment of impact, however, the entire wave field disappears and a photon appears. Quantum physicists often describe this by saying the spread-out wave “collapses” into a small point.

Similarly, photons make it possible for us to see the world around us. In total darkness, our eyes are actually able to sense single photons, but generally what we see in our daily lives comes to us in the form of zillions of photons produced by light sources and reflected off objects. If you look around you right now, there is probably a light source in the room producing photons, and objects in the room that reflect those photons. Your eyes absorb some of the photons flowing through the room, and that’s how you see.

But wait. What makes a light source produce photons? We’ll get to that. Next.
There are many different ways to produce photons, but all of them use the same mechanism inside an atom to do it. This mechanism involves the energizing of electrons orbiting each atom’s nucleus. How Nuclear Radiation Works describes protons, neutrons and electrons in some detail. For example, hydrogen atoms have one electron orbiting the nucleus. Helium atoms have two electrons orbiting the nucleus. Aluminum atoms have 13 electrons circling the nucleus. Each atom has a preferred number of electrons zipping around its nucleus.

Electrons circle the nucleus in fixed orbits — a simplified way to think about it is to imagine how satellites orbit the Earth. There’s a huge amount of theory around electron orbitals, but to understand light there is just one key fact to understand: An electron has a natural orbit that it occupies, but if you energize an atom, you can move its electrons to higher orbitals. A photon is produced whenever an electron in a higher-than-normal orbit falls back to its normal orbit. During the fall from high energy to normal energy, the electron emits a photon — a packet of energy — with very specific characteristics. The photon has a frequency, or color, that exactly matches the distance the electron falls.

You can see this phenomenon quite clearly in gas-discharge lamps. Fluorescent lamps, neon signs and sodium-vapor lamps are common examples of this kind of electric lighting, which passes an electric current through a gas to make the gas emit light. The colors of gas-discharge lamps vary widely depending on the identity of the gas and the construction of the lamp.

For example, along highways and in parking lots, you often see sodium vapor lights. You can tell a sodium vapor light because it’s really yellow when you look at it. A sodium vapor light energizes sodium atoms to generate photons. A sodium atom has 11 electrons, and because of the way they’re stacked in orbitals one of those electrons is most likely to accept and emit energy. The energy packets that this electron is most likely to emit fall right around a wavelength of 590 nanometers. This wavelength corresponds to yellow light. If you run sodium light through a prism, you don’t see a rainbow — you see a pair of yellow lines.
Another way to make photons, known as chemiluminescence, involves chemical reactions. When these reactions occur in living organisms such as bacteria, fireflies, squid and deep-sea fishes, the process is known as bioluminescence. At least two chemicals are required to make light. Chemists use the generic term luciferin to describe the one producing the light. They use the term luciferase to describe the enzyme that drives, or catalyzes, the reaction.

The basic reaction follows a straightforward sequence. First, the luciferase catalyzes the oxidation of luciferin. In other words, luciferin combines chemically with oxygen to produce oxyluciferin. The reaction also produces light, usually in the blue or green region of the spectrum. Sometimes, the luciferin binds with a catalyzing protein and oxygen in a large structure known as a photoprotein. When an ion — typically calcium — is added to the photoprotein, it oxidizes the luciferin, resulting in light and inactive oxyluciferin.

In marine organisms, the blue light produced by bioluminescence is most helpful because the wavelength of the light, around 470 nanometers, transmits much farther in water. Also, most organisms don’t have pigments in their visual organs that enable them to see longer (yellow, red) or shorter (indigo, ultraviolet) wavelengths. One exception can be found in the Malacosteid family of fishes, also known as loosejaws. These animals can both produce red light and detect it when other organisms can’t.

Want to know more about how and why living things make light? Check out How Bioluminescence Works for a deep dive.

We’ll heat things up next with incandescence.
Probably the most common way to energize atoms is with heat, and this is the basis of incandescence. If you heat up a horseshoe with a blowtorch, it will eventually get red-hot, and if you indulge your inner pyromaniac and heat it even more, it gets white hot. Red is the lowest-energy visible light, so in a red-hot object the atoms are just getting enough energy to begin emitting light that we can see. Once you apply enough heat to cause white light, you are energizing so many different electrons in so many different ways that all of the colors are being generated — they all mix together to look white.

Heat is the most common way we see light being generated — a normal 75-watt incandescent bulb is generating light by using electricity to create heat. Electricity runs through a tungsten filament housed inside a glass sphere. Because the filament is so thin, it offers a good bit of resistance to the electricity, and this resistance turns electrical energy into heat. The heat is enough to make the filament glow white-hot. Unfortunately, this isn’t very efficient. Most of the energy that goes into an incandescent bulb is lost as heat. In fact, a typical light bulb produces perhaps 15 lumens per watt of input power compared to a fluorescent bulb, which produces between 50 and 100 lumens per watt.

Combustion offers another way to produce photons. Combustion occurs when a substance — the fuel — combines rapidly with oxygen, producing heat and light. If you study a campfire or even a candle flame carefully, you will notice a small colorless gap between the wood or the wick and the flames. In this gap, gases are rising and getting heated. When they finally get hot enough, the gases combine with oxygen and are able to emit light. The flame, then, is nothing more than a mixture of reacting gases emitting visible, infrared and some ultraviolet light.

Next up we’ll shine a light on lasers.