[humanbydefault]

“THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY: THE DARK SIDE OF THE PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT.” [By M. de Zayas, author of the book “Warning Scientific Discretion Advised”]


“Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way. [Edward de bono].


PART ONE
No matter how many incursions you may do across countless Internet sites, books and other forms of literature concerning the so-called “photoelectric effect,” I promise you one thing:
“The arguments that you’re going read in this (controversial?) article have been brought to you as the fruit of my own personal work of IMAGINATION.” [Myself! Humanbydefault will guarantee it!]
But before getting right into the heart of Einstein’s world class achievement, allow me to introduce you the elements that make up for the good, the bad and the ugly of such amazing puzzle of our reality.
Q. What is the “photoelectric effect”?
A. When light shines on a metal surface, the surface “emits electrons.” Those “electrons” are sometimes referred as “photo-electrons.” [This is a short conclusion I’d rate it as being fairly general].
Allow me to stop just right here to explain the reasons for the use of those intriguing QUOTATION MARKS you won’t see “hanging on both sides” of words like electrons, emission, knockings, ejecting and even the scandalous transforming in any of the millions of existent descriptions about the mentioned effect. Since those useful little marks on top of those words are what we need to uncover the worse side of the UGLY, I warn you about the fact that words could also be used to hide evidences in support of BAD theories, namely Bohr’s atomic model.
“To emit,” “to knock out,” “to eject,” “to cause the ejection or emission,” “to transform,” those are some of the verbs currently used to depict the action of a “photon” after “colliding” against an “electron.”
As you could easily realize, the phraseology has changed a bit and that [no matter your assumed irrelevancy such issue may or may not have] is due to the BAD angle of its theoretical side. From a more classical and “primitive” knocking and ejecting, the technical language used to express this effect has “jumped” into more sophisticated and CONVENTIENT ways of linguistic expressions… more wave-friendly perhaps? “Emitting” and even the outrageous hint to a “photon-transformation into an electron…”
Q. Are we witnessing the first signs of a radical theoretical mind change?
A. I certainly hope so! The sooner the better!
Q. What was the revolutionary idea behind the “photo-electric effect”?
A. It helped to demonstrate that light was made up by “chunks” of energy [quantum of light] and such energy was in direct proportionality with the frequency of the wave instead of its amplitude as it was wrongly thought in the past. It also proved that some highly energetic photons [as those quanta of light were later called] were able to… [OH LORD! Which one should I use to described the effect…?] COLLIDE with “electrons” eventually causing them to be EJECTED from their original orbit… (Feel free to correct me if I have misused those underlined verbs on purpose however I’d like to point out the indisputable fact that you’ll find similar descriptions of the same event elsewhere too).
Albert Einstein received the Noble Prize in 1921 for his work in what’s known today as the “photoelectric effect.” Since the content of my views was (mainly) written for a physics-friendly audience, I decided to omit both the antecedents concerning the bulk of previous research conducting to the “photo-electric effect” and the experimental set-up performed by R.A. Millikan in 1913-1914. I suggest to any potential reader of my writings, anyone who was not familiar with the subject, to go to any serious page of the Internet and to acquire the basics skills needed to be able to learn about a truth that’s been missed behind our false perception of reality. Allow me to give you a good tip:

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000...oelectric.html

It's simple and besides... you could find pretty pictures too!
Being said that, let’s talk about the nature of light first. Light and its nature has been the subject of an old theoretical dispute between English and German physicists for centuries [no one could deny it]. There was a small group that believed that light was composed by a bunch of “lumps” of E-M energy [Newton among them]. The other group [Young among them] however, insisted on the wave-nature of light and considered the idea of “particleness” nothing but horrendous. The “two slit experiment” was [and continues to be… at least for me] the best proof that light [as ENERGY] PROPAGATES as a wave. You have to excuse the use and abuse of capital letters sometimes; it’s my style… Anyway! I see the lesson of Young experiment as a wake-up call, a sort of “universal revelation” of the true nature of light and matter after one of the simplest experimental displays in science… I’m speaking for myself here, no disrespect!
Then the question remains:
Is light a “particle” too? Allow me to answer this question by posing another. Is there any way available for energy to propagate throughout the vacuum in a different configuration rather than in waves? [Let’s put it in other way] Could light chose to spread itself across space in any other way than in waves? Of course not! So it is reasonably logical to see why early physicists were misled assuming light as an endless indivisible entity. Time has passed since those early disagreements of the “chicken or the egg” nature. Scientific progress has made its presence in our societies but the fact of the matter is that light STILL TODAY propagates as a wave and not as “chunks”… Make no mistakes about it!
SO! I hope that THAT takes care of the WAVE SIDE of the story about light. Now! I need you [please] to pay attention to the BAD side of the story.
Imagine that you could have ENERGY in a liquid form… hypothetically speaking! Let’s say that E-M energy was just like clear and plain water. This “magic water” of my story will have the ability to move across space in waves every time we throw some of its content away. We will observe that the bigger and closer its waves crests get, the greater volume of water we were able to throw at a given time… this concept is called frequency. Then it shouldn’t be the end of the world to assume that by making water-waves to “FOLD-in” [just like a piece of paper would] we were “putting in” more ENERGY [water or paper in my analogy] without changing the actual size of the original wave. It is not a problem [I assume] to conclude that a “folded” piece of paper could hold more energy [paper] than an open-spread sheet of the same type of paper. For more details you could ask any of those ladies of older generations about their old fashion fans.
The issue about the LIMITED quantity making up for a “lump” of E-M energy was observed by Max Plank around the year 1900. He resolved the puzzle of the resulting spectrum of radiation emitted in a form of light while experimenting with what physicists then called a “black body.” Plank observed that the only plausible way to explain his results was to assume that light had to be “quantized” [quantified] in some “denominations” just like money. So! If the frequency of the light increased with its energy is fair to say that SOMEWHERE SOMETHING had to do the “job” of sort of “FOLDING” some of that ENERGY into a more “compact package.”
Q. If frequency could be seen as the density of paper being folded into a more compact structure, what is intensity then?
A. NO BIG DEAL! Intensity could be translated into the actual size of a fan with equal number of folding. Let’s say that you could fold a small piece of paper back and forward ten times and you want to duplicate the original “intensity” of the fan, all you need to do is look for a bigger piece of paper [twice as long] folding it also ten times. You’d have increased the “intensity” of the initial “paper wave” by two.
At this point, my story takes a different theoretical path getting far from what you may read in those fancy WebPages repeating over and over again the same empty arguments.
If light is in fact a “crunch” of light with no mass and no charges…
Q. How could such “lump” of pure E-M energy be able to BLOWN-APART a “piece of matter” from the very structure of the atom?
Q. Could any one out-there [please] could answer me why the molecular structure on the surface of the metal (previously) shined with light did not change its chemical properties?
Q. I have been told that if an atom looses one electron it will become an ion. Is the “photoelectric effect” capable of turning into ions every single atom on the surface of the metal being previously and continuously exposed to light?
Q. After having read a great deal of articles about the “photo-electric effect” do you know how many times did I find clues to where atoms GET their electrons BACK and with it their alleged neutrality?
A. ZERO!
Have you learned about such results in relation to direct consequences of the effect? Cause I haven’t!
You are a smart guy… Just think about it! Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by “old `perceptions frozen into language…”
Let’s hypothetically assume that every single atom of this vast universe was the amazing result of a pattern of interference between two or more specks of pure radiation energy. [I have given a name to that special pattern in my book. I baptized them as “Standing Nuclear waves”].
In my imagination I saw a sort of HARMONIC structure in a multi-level configuration limited by scales. I want you to picture a huge PIANO inside your mind. In my hypothetical example I will ask you to introduce some weird design changes to that same piano that you have already figure out. Let’s assume that the very first scale (the first seven keys starting from left to right) was looking just like the real one. Be ready! Because the weird thing comes in a moment! Let’s change the SIZE and SPACE between the keys of the next scale (the one located next to the right). As a matter of fact, I want you to change each consecutive scale by the square of the distance between its previous scales. Don’t worry! I will not ask you to play such incredible piano!
However I’ll ask you to imagine what would happen the moment we play one key. I’d imagine that harmonics of the key played above in my thought experiment would produce some sort of vibration on its far-reaching octaves across the piano. If we assumed that the first key from the very first scale was the first level of energy [an unknown “particle” by the way] we could easily identify the scale of “electrons” as one of the last to the right.
Q. Are you saying that whatever is causing the first scale to spin and “vibrate” will be responsible for what’s happening in distant scales too?
A. That’s my point! The smallest “sub-atomic particle” of the human’s particle catalogue [by the time of these writings by the way] was still considered to be the quark. I’d imagine them to be located somewhere in the vicinity of the point closer to the middle scale in our hypothetical piano. To the right, a more familiar scale would spread making up for what we’ve named “protons.” I would assign the black keys to be the rightful holders of a different concept: the NEUTRON. Imagine [again, hypothetically speaking] that NEUTRONS were some sort of “solution” to accommodate two keys [from different energy families] both of the same scale, into a new form or “COMPROMISE.” I know! We have never seen a piano key to decay before, but we could theoretically assume that those black keys were indeed an intermediate sound between two adjacent ones. Now! Every piano (including the one built in our minds) has black keys in every single scale… Am I right or wrong?
So! What rights do we have to ignore that the same “energy-solution” seen before with NEUTRONS would be repeated across the entire range of scales? Haven’t you heard about the existence of a concept called SYMMETRY before? Of course you have! Then why should we ignore the lesson when it comes to the nature of the smallest speck of matter? I’ll tell you why! Because we don’t do our homework!
Q. Out of the countless times we’ve looked at the spectrum of light in the simplest case found in nature [the hydrogen atom] have you ever asked yourself (at least once) where those energy levels came from?
A. I know you will start talking about De Broglie’s work and the “Pauli exclusion principle.” I also know that you will include phrases like quantum numbers and sophisticated words like Fermions and Bosons. However after all the effective display of equations and arguments you won’t be able to supply me with a single solid argument that could explain the origin of those energy levels. One thing is trying to describe them [with mathematical logos] and a totally different one trying to explain where they came from in the first place! Since the present atomic model is obsolete and flawed… No offense! I won’t ask you to embarrass yourself by attempting such a task!
I’ll give you the answer to the question instead… The hypothetical piano!
(To be continued…)
HUMANBYDEFAULT