The Photoelectric Effect Paradox

The photoelectric effect paradox continued to plague physics until in 1905 Albert Einstein published another paper in which he drew upon the work of Max Planck to explain this photoelectric effect. The idea was that light itself was quantized and the units of that carried this quantized energy were called photons so whenever a photon struck an electron it gave up its entire energy to that electron. This explains why there was a strict maximum energy limit to of the emitted electrons because they could not obtain any more energy than that carried by a single incident photons.