Light scattering.
A visible light photon comes from the sun and enters the atmosphere. An atom in the atmosphere has electrons, whose positions can be described as probabilities (orbitals). The electric field of the photon can cause an electron in the atom to vibrate and in turn the electron...
Thanks. Do you have some resource(s) (website, book) to recommend for a more detailed, yet simple, explanation? [The websites listed at the start of this thread are dead.] To give you an idea of my current level of comprehension, I think of wavelength as being a property in the direction of...
Thanks for the response Inha. It sounds like you have the background to answer my question. [The x-ray question I asked is not as intuitive to me as the microwave oven one.] If size doesn't matter (in the x-ray experiment), then what is this author (found via Google) referring to?
Dauter, Z...
Let me rephrase an earlier question:
Light photons can pass through the metal mesh in a microwave oven; microwaves can't.
1) If this isn't a measure of something similar to "size" for a macroscopic object, then what is it a measure of?
2) If there are different techniques to measure this...
Do you know anything about x-ray crystallography?
Crystals are regular geometric arrays of atoms (molecules, ions). The electrons of the atoms scatter x-rays and by measuring the position and intensity of the scattered rays, information about the structure can be obtained.
Often the...
I have been wondering about the size of photons as well, or even what sense that question makes.
1) My microwave oven has metal mesh in the door. Can visible light photons from a bulb in the interior pass through the holes in the mesh? Can microwave photons pass through the holes in the mesh...