The Speed of Light
In Our Time
00:00
The Paradox of Light
There's always been a strange dichotomy about the behavior of light. In some experiments you can make light behave as though it is a collection of tiny little microscopic billiard balls. But in other experiments it doesn't behave like that at all. It behaves like a wave. And when you add two waves together, if you put them out of phase so that troughs coincide with peaks of the other wave, you can produce a net effect of darkness in one place and extra brightness in another. This was something of a paradox for many hundreds of years. Quantum theory has allowed us to square this circle as it were.
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