Mention two observations which
could not be explained by the
wave nature of electromagnetic
radiations.
Answers
few examples of particle nature over wave nature :-
-photoelectric effect
Explanation:
ANSWER:
What phenomena could not be explained by the wave nature of light?
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6 Answers

Apratim Banerjee, Interested in physics
Answered March 13, 2018
I would like to throw some light to the history and developements of what led to the failure of the wave nature of light.
The wave nature of light is a theory that states that light is a disturbance in which the particles vibrate in a direction at right angles to the direction of the disturbance. This was widely accepted by physicists till the middle of the nineteenth century, as it could satisfactorily explain the principles of reflection, refraction, intereference diffraction phenomena of light. Of course the difficulty was that a wave required a medium to travel through for its propagation , but Maxwell explained that with his famous electromagnetic theory (I will not go into that).
What could not be explained was the phenomenon of photoelectric effect. Around 1887, it was observed that certain metals when irradiated by ultraviolet light, emitted negatively charged particles.
Hallwach and Lenard observed this phenomenon and they came to some conclusions that could not be explained by the wave theory. These were, in brief:
According to wave theory, more the intensity of incident radtation, more should be the photoelectric current. But this was contrary to the observation that the maximum kinetic energy of the electrons were independent from the intensity.
It also failed to explain the existence of threshold frequency, that no matter how high the intensity, photoelectric emission will not occur till the frequency of incident radiation is higher than the he threshold frequency.
Each electron intercepts an insignificantly small amount of energy and so it should require a finite time to escape from the metal surface. But it was observed that the emission is always instantaneous.
Thus the particle nature of light came into existence by the famous, Einstein.
This new theory could explain other phenomenon like the Compton effect which is an increase in wavelength of X-rays or gamma rays that occurs when they are scattered.
But since the wave nature of light successfully explained the other phenomena I mentioned above, a dual nature of light radiation was accepted.
Hope this answers your question to some extent, I did not go into the details and I answered upto the knowledge I had.
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Subham Pal, Lecturer at Govt Polytechnic College (2018-present)
Answered March 13, 2018
The first thing that comes to anyone's mind while answering this question is photoelectric effect. Well , that was a phenomenon well known to physicists before Einstein but no one could explain the various characteristics shown by the photoelectric effect considering light as a wave.
Einstein assumed light to be stream of particles thereby explaining photoelectric effects quite satisfactorily .
Secondly, you can't sudy the generation of laser and more so , you cant even imagine the concept of laser without considering light as particulate in nature .
Now coming to theory of special relativity , the mathematical formulation of time dilation (perhaps , the most satisfying and mind blowing concept) is quite difficult without considering light as stream of photons. You will know what I mean , if you see the corresponding derivations .
Finally , compton effect , can not be explained by wave nature of light . Infact analyis of Compton effect strongly verified the particulate nature of light .
May be there are some more phenomena that could be explained by particulate nature of light and not by wave nature but I can't remember them right now . I could update my answer if I remember them, if necessary .