Re: Energy-sucking EM antennas

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

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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