- How did Lenard's later political career diverge from the science that won him the prize?
Photoelectric Effect
Light ejecting electrons from matter, and its quantum explanation.
- Why did increasing the brightness of light below a certain frequency fail to eject electrons from a metal surface?
- Why did this paper, rather than relativity or E=mc², end up winning Einstein his Nobel Prize?
- Why did light below a certain threshold frequency fail to eject electrons no matter how bright the lamp?
- Why did the Nobel Committee choose the photoelectric effect over relativity to honor Einstein?
- How did the discovery that light arrives in discrete packets make quantum mechanics unavoidable?
- What modern technologies trace back directly to the photoelectric effect?
- What did Compton observe when X-rays scattered off a graphite target?
- Why was the wavelength shift in scattered X-rays hard to explain using wave theory alone?
- How does treating a photon as having momentum explain the Compton effect's wavelength shift?
- Why did the Compton effect settle the debate over whether light behaves as a particle?
- Why did Millikan spend years trying to disprove Einstein's photoelectric equation before his own measurements ended up confirming it?
- What did Compton's X-ray scattering experiment prove about the nature of light?
- What discredited the classical, continuous-wave picture of radiation?
- How did Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger each build on Planck's original idea of quantized energy?
- What three discoveries did Einstein publish in his 1905 annus mirabilis papers?
- Why did Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize cite the photoelectric effect rather than his theory of relativity?
- What four papers did Einstein publish between March and September 1905, and what did each establish?