After receiving several letters from his secretary, Planck discovered that the addresses on the envelopes were all from the same country.
He frowned and asked again: "How come these are all from Japan? Are there any letters from China? The China that produces tea and porcelain!"
"China? I remembered that there was indeed a letter sent from there with the telegram this morning," the secretary said with a hint of sarcasm, "Professor, this is the first time I have seen a Chinese submit a letter to "Physics" "Yearbook" submission, the content is probably similar to those Indian physics papers that tirelessly sent one after another to prove that Newton's laws of motion are wrong, so I took it upon myself to withhold it and did not send it to you."
"Get me this letter immediately, I want to read it now!"
The secretary didn't know why the slovenly bald old professor suddenly lost his temper, so he could only leave the office angrily. After a while, he returned again with a thick envelope.
"Professor, this should be the letter."
The secretary learned a lesson this time and quietly left after handing in the envelope. He didn't want to be the victim of unknown fire again.
The date on the postmark is November 20, 1922, which means that this letter has been wandering for more than forty days, crossing the Pacific Ocean, Malacca, the Indian Ocean, and Suez. After landing in Marseille, it was again sitting on a rumbling and white-smoking train. After several twists and turns, the steam train arrived at this office in Berlin.
After opening the envelope that still smelled like the sea, taking out the folded letter paper, and laying it out on his desk, Planck saw the title of the paper, "Another Effect between Light and Electrons: On Monochromatic Gamma" A quantum physics explanation of the change in properties of rays after they are scattered by matter.
“In 1887, when German physicist Heinrich Hertz was studying electromagnetic waves, he accidentally discovered that ultraviolet rays irradiated onto metal electrodes could help generate sparks.
"Eighteen years later, in 1905, Dr. Albert Einstein published a paper entitled "An Illuminating View of the Generation and Transformation of Light," introducing the concept of 'light quanta' and successfully giving This is a theoretical explanation of this experimental phenomenon called the 'photoelectric effect'. For this achievement, Dr. Einstein was just awarded last year's Nobel Prize in Physics this year. ..."
Seeing such a past event written at the beginning of the paper immediately brought back a long-lost memory of Planck's.
In 1905, Planck had been working as an editor in the editorial office of "Annals of Physics" for ten years.
One day, he received a submission from Einstein, who was still a clerk at the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland. The topic was to explain the photoelectric effect using the light quantum hypothesis.
In fact, Planck was initially opposed to Einstein's light quantum hypothesis because he was unwilling to give up Maxwell's electrodynamics and stubbornly believed that light is a continuous wave, not particles one by one.
He refuted Einstein in this way: "Your theory of light quanta has set back the theory of physics not by decades, but by hundreds of years! Huygens had already proposed that light is a continuous wave rather than a particle as Newton said. !”
But even so, Planck still agreed to publish five papers, including this one, in the "Annals of Physics", which created a story about the miracle year of 1905.
That's right, at this time, the "Annals of Physics" did not yet have the evil peer review of later generations. It only needed to go through an initial screening by the editor before it could be published.
It was not until the first Solvay Conference in 1911 that Planck was basically convinced by Einstein and accepted the latter's light quantum hypothesis.
Unexpectedly, time flies by so quickly, and it has been nearly twenty years since I met Einstein.
After coming back to his senses, Planck continued to look at the paper in his hand.
"In 1904, when British physicist Arthur Ive was studying the absorption and scattering properties of gamma rays, he discovered that gamma rays scattered by materials such as iron plates or aluminum plates are often stronger than the incident rays. Softer. Later, through further experiments and research by David Florance, Joseph Gray and others, they finally obtained the conclusion that after monochromatic gamma rays are scattered, their properties will change. The larger the scattering angle, the The softer the scattered rays are, this conclusion has nothing to do with the material of the scattering object.
“But over the years the physics community has been at a loss as to what theory should be used to accurately and appropriately explain this phenomenon, and no unified consensus has been reached.
"Also eighteen years after Ive discovered the gamma ray phenomenon, the author started from Dr. Einstein's light quantum theory and tried to give a quantum physics explanation for this phenomenon. ..."
Seeing this, Plank frowned slightly again.
This Chinese man specifically emphasized the eighteen years twice in his paper. Is he implying that his achievements can rival Einstein's?
In Planck's impression, Chinese people are all gentle, elegant and easy-going gentlemen like Xia Yuanxi and Cai Yuanpei. Why is this young man so arrogant?
When Chen Muwu originally wrote this paragraph, he did have a sense of "I am a madman of Chu, and Feng Ge laughs at Confucius".
Since he already knew that his theory was correct, why did he still pretend to be a grandson?
The Chinese people have been gentle, courteous and thrifty for too long, so they were misunderstood as weak by the white-skinned foreign devils and bullied them.
With a little displeasure, Planck continued to read the rest of the paper.
"For the time being, the author regards the light quantum (das Lichtquant) mentioned by Dr. Einstein as a kind of particle, and named it 'photon (das Photon)'. The root of the word comes from the ancient Greek word for light φῶς (phôs). and φωτός (phōtós).”
That's right, the name photon, which would seem to be a given in later generations, has not yet appeared at this time.
Photon? Is light really a particle?
Gangplank muttered.
"The theory of photoelectric effect reveals that photons have energy. If it is considered that photons have energy and also have their own momentum, they are incident into the scattering material and collide with the free electrons in it, then the following derivation can be made:..."
It is not a new idea that light quanta has momentum.
In 1909, Einstein had already proposed at an international conference that light quanta should have momentum.
In 1916, he even gave the momentum formula of light quantum, p=h/λ, in his paper "Quantum Discussion of Radiation".
However, this paper may be the first time that the momentum of light quanta is used for calculation in a specific example.
How did he combine the two? Was it a keen intuition or a mistake?
"From this we can draw a conclusion: when photons are emitted from the photon source and enter the scattering material, they mainly interact with the electrons in it. When the frequency of the incident light is low and the energy of the photon is of the same order of magnitude as the electron binding energy, then It mainly produces the photoelectric effect, where atoms absorb the energy of photons and produce ionization.
"When the frequency of the incident light is quite large and the energy of the photon far exceeds the binding energy of the electron, the electrons in the material can be regarded as free electrons. At this time, the photons can be considered to scatter the free electrons, which is what is specifically discussed in this article. This effect. This also explains why this scattering has nothing to do with the properties of the material.…”
