Editing Light (section)

===Quantum theory===
In 1900 [[Max Planck]], attempting to explain [[black-body radiation]], suggested that although light was a wave, these waves could gain or lose energy only in finite amounts related to their frequency. Planck called these "lumps" of light energy "[[quantum|quanta]]" (from a Latin word for "how much"). In 1905, Albert Einstein used the idea of light quanta to explain the [[photoelectric effect]] and suggested that these light quanta had a "real" existence. In 1923 [[Arthur Holly Compton]] showed that the wavelength shift seen when low intensity X-rays scattered from electrons (so called [[Compton scattering]]) could be explained by a particle-theory of X-rays, but not a wave theory. In 1926 [[Gilbert N. Lewis]] named these light quanta particles [[photon]]s.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToMolecularSpectroscopy |title=Introduction to Molecular Spectroscopy |last=Barrow |first=Gordon M. |publisher=McGraw-Hill |year=1962 |lccn=62-12478}}{{dead link|date=March 2025}}</ref>

Eventually [[quantum mechanics]] came to picture light as (in some sense) ''both'' a particle and a wave, and (in another sense) as a phenomenon which is ''neither'' a particle nor a wave (which actually are macroscopic phenomena, such as baseballs or ocean waves). Instead, under some approximations light can be described sometimes with mathematics appropriate to one type of macroscopic metaphor (particles) and sometimes another macroscopic metaphor (waves).

As in the case for radio waves and the X-rays involved in Compton scattering, physicists have noted that electromagnetic radiation tends to behave more like a classical wave at lower frequencies, but more like a classical particle at higher frequencies, but never completely loses all qualities of one or the other. Visible light, which occupies a middle ground in frequency, can easily be shown in experiments to be describable using either a wave or particle model, or sometimes both.

In 1924–1925, [[Satyendra Nath Bose]] showed that light followed different statistics from that of classical particles. With Einstein, they generalized this result for a whole set of integer spin particles called [[boson]]s (after Bose) that follow [[Bose–Einstein statistics]]. The photon is a massless boson of spin 1.

In 1927, [[Paul Dirac]] quantized the [[electromagnetic field]]. [[Pascual Jordan]] and [[Vladimir Fock]] generalized this process to treat many-body systems as excitations of quantum fields, a process with the misnomer of [[second quantization]]. And at the end of the 1940s a full theory of [[quantum electrodynamics]] was developed using quantum fields based on the works of [[Julian Schwinger]], [[Richard Feynman]], [[Freeman Dyson]], and [[Shinichiro Tomonaga]].