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Re: Energy-sucking EM antennas



On Thu, 26 Aug 1999, Bob Sciamanda wrote:


Hi Bill,
Thanks for the references, I'll look into at least Bohren's.
For now let me just notice that, in my experience, every "modern physics"
text quotes the above effect (an electron gathering more energy, in a
smaller time, than a wave model allows) as an argument in favor of
Einstein's photon model of the photoelectric effect, and against a wave
model of this interaction.

Really? That's astounding, since waves and particles must obviously obey
wave/particle duality in such a situation. The waves must be *quantized*
of course, just like they are in the double-slit experiment, but that
doesn't affect the basic wave/particle concepts. To say differently would
be to treat photons as if they were little billiard balls.

A conventional EM antenna can be regarded as being like a single large
atom which emits large numbers of photons in a single coherent
electromagnetic wave. If atoms serve as tiny antennas, they just have a
much weaker radiation than a radio transmitter's antenna, so that their
output wave is full of obvious quanta. It's the "dim light 2-slit
experiment."

All the QM interpretations I'm familiar with say that the "wave" is still
there even when the intensity of the light has been reduced to the
single-particle regime. I don't understand why a QM text would want to
argue with this or to say that atoms are some kind of special case.


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