SHS – Physical Science

I. Introductory Concept
In the previous lesson, you understood that light originates from the accelerated
motion of photon. It is an electromagnetic phenomenon and only a tiny part of a larger
whole wide range of electromagnetic waves called the electromagnetic spectrum. In this
lesson, you will know about the two forms of light- as a particle and as a wave and
understand how these two forms explained the propagation, reflection, and refraction of
light.

Knowing the properties of light is very essential in understanding the complexity

of matter and energy. Hence, this knowledge will give you clear understanding about the
propagation of light. Do you want to want to see this brightness? Read on and
accomplish the tasks prepared for you in this learning packet.

II. Learning Competencies

✓ Describe how the propagation of light, reflection, and refraction are explained by
the wave model and particle model of light. (S11/12PS-IVf-59)
✓ Explain how photon concept and the fact that the energy of a photon is directly
proportional to its frequency can be used to explain why red light is used in
photographic dark rooms, why we get easily sunburned in ultraviolet light but not
in visible light and how to see colors. (S11/12PS-ivg-64)

III. Activities
Learning Activity 1: LIGHT MYSTERY
Directions: Picture A shows the image of the students on water while Picture B
shows a glass with refracted light. Explain the light phenomena happened in the
pictures below.

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 1
Directions: The concepts below are connected to your explanation in the Light
Mystery Activity. Let us deepen your understanding by explaining the
phenomena being exhibited by the picture below.

Photo credits: University Physics, 13th Edition Hugh D. Young Roger A. Freedman

Figure 1: Light Ray Diagram

Guide Question:
1. How is light propagated? What two important aspects of propagation of light
are being exhibited by Figure 1?
When a light wave strikes a smooth interface separating two transparent
materials (such as air, glass or water), the light wave is somewhat reflected and
partly refracted into the second medium or material, as shown in Figure 1. For
example, when you look into a glass window in the mall from the street, you see a
reflection of the street scene, but a person inside the mall can look out through the
glass window at the same scene as light reaches him or her by refraction.
Now, try to describe REFLECTION and REFRACTION of light by illustrating
the particle and wave model of light. Let us describe how the light is being
propagated in each model.

Particle and Wave Refraction

Christian Huygens ingeniously described how each point on a wave could
produce its own wavelets, which then add together to form a wavefront. Huygens
employed this idea to produce a detailed theory for the refraction phenomenon, and
also to explain why light rays do not crash into each other when they cross paths.

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 Figure 2. Refraction of Particles and Waves

When a beam of light travels between two media having different refractive
indices, the beam undergo refraction, and changes direction when it passes from the
first medium into the second. To determine whether the light beam is composed of
waves or particles, a model for each can be devised to explain the phenomenon
(Figure 2). According to Huygens' wave theory, a small portion of each angled
wavefront should impact the second medium before the rest of the front reaches the
interface. This portion will start to move through the second medium while the rest of
the wave is still traveling in the first medium but will move more slowly due to the
higher refractive index of the second medium. Because the wavefront is now
traveling at two different speeds, it will bend into the second medium, thus changing
the angle of propagation.
Particle and Wave Reflection
An excellent comparison of the wave and particle theories involves the
differences that occur when light is reflected from a smooth, specular surface, such
as a mirror. Wave theory speculates that a light source emits light waves that spread
in all directions. Upon impacting a mirror, the waves are reflected according to the
arrival angles, but with each wave turned back to front to produce a reversed image
(Figure 3). The shape of arriving waves is strongly dependent upon how far the light
source is from the mirror. Light originating from a close source still maintains a
spherical, highly curved wavefront, while light emitted from a distance source will
spread more and impact the mirror with wavefronts that are almost planar.

Particles Waves
Figure 3. Particles and Waves Reflected by a Mirror

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 3
 The case for a particle nature for light is far stronger with regards to the
reflection phenomenon than it is for refraction. Light emitted by a source, whether
near or far, arrives at the mirror surface as a stream of particles, which bounce away
or are reflected from the smooth surface. Because the particles are very tiny, a huge
number are involved in a propagating light beam, where they travel side by side very
close together. Upon impacting the mirror, the particles bounce from different points,
so their order in the light beam is reversed upon reflection to produce a reversed
image, as demonstrated in Figure 3. Both the particle and wave theories adequately
explain reflection from a smooth surface. However, the particle theory also suggests
that if the surface is very rough, the particles bounce away at a variety of angles
which resulted to the scattering the light
SOURCE: Robert T. Sutter, Matthew J. Parry-Hill and Michael W. Davidson - National High Magnetic Field
Laboratory, 1800 East Paul Dirac Dr., The Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, 32310.
Retrieved from https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/particleorwave/refraction/index.html

LAWS OF REFLECTION AND REFRACTION

1. The incident, reflected, and refracted rays and the normal to the surface all
lie in the same plane. The plane of the three rays and the normal, called the plane of
incidence, is perpendicular to the plane of the boundary surface between the two
materials.
2. The angle of reflection is equal to the
angle of incidence for all wavelengths and for any
pair of materials. This relationship, together with
the observation that the incident and reflected rays
and the normal all lie in the same plane is called
the law of reflection.

𝜃𝑟 = 𝜃𝑖

Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/25-2-the-law-of-reflection/

3. For monochromatic light and for a given pair of materials, and on opposite sides of
the interface, the ratio of the sines of the angles and where both angles are measured from
the normal to the surface, is equal to the inverse
ratio of the two indexes of refraction:
sin 𝜃1 𝑛2
=
sin 𝜃2 𝑛1
𝑛1 sin 𝜃1 = 𝑛2 sin 𝜃2 (law of refraction)

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 4
Learning Activity 2: WORD PUZZLE
Directions: Below are the persons behind the Source: https://intl.siyavula.com/read/science/grade-
development of concept of photons.
11/geometrical-optics/05-geometrical-optics-0
Arrange the letters and match it to their accomplishment.
1. He light traveled in straight lines.

2. He argued that light is made of pulses that propagate instantaneously when

contacting ‘balls’ in a medium.

3. He showed how to make reflected, refracted, and screened waves of light and
also explained double refraction

4. He predicted an ‘electromagnetic wave’, which can self-sustain, even in a

vacuum, in the absence of conventional currents

5. He used the term Lichtquant, or quantum of light

CHOICES

SCDEARTES ELIDUC HGENSUY STEEIINN NTONWE XWELMAL

A photon is a particle of light which essentially is a packet of electromagnetic

radiation. The energy of the photon depends on its frequency (how fast the electric
field and magnetic field wiggle). The higher the frequency, the more energy the
photon has. Of course, a beam of light has many photons. This means that really
intense red light (lots of photons, with slightly lower energy) can carry more power to
a given area than less intense blue light (fewer photons with higher energy).
The speed of light (c) in a vacuum is constant with a speed of 2.998 x
108 m/s. This means more energetic (high frequency) photons like X-

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 5
rays and gamma rays travel at exactly the same speed as lower energy (low
frequency) photons, like those in the infrared. As the frequency of a photon goes up,
the wavelength (λ) goes down, and as the frequency goes down, the wavelength
increases.

The equation that relates these three quantities for photons is:
c=λf
where: c = speed of light (2.998 x 108 m/s)
λ = photon wavelength
f = photon frequency

Because wavelength and frequency are determined by each other, the equation for
the energy contained in a photon can be written in two different ways:

E=hf or E=hc
f
where: E = energy of the photon
h = the Planck's constant (6.62606957(29)×10-34 J·s )
f = photon frequency
λ = photon wavelength
c = speed of light (2.998 x 108 m/s)

One of the strangest discoveries of quantum mechanics is that light and other small
particles, like photons, are either waves or particles depending on the experiment that
measures them. When light passes through a prism they spread out according to
wavelength. Contrarily, bombard metal with light, and it displays a particle side of its nature,
where only photons that have more than a specific amount of energy release electrons.
This experiment, called the photoelectric effect, is what won Einstein his Nobel Prize.
Photons with insufficient energy can hit metal, yet won't knock any electrons loose. Photons
that exceed a threshold energy usually do knock the electrons loose, however, as the
photon's energy becomes much greater than necessary the likelihood that it ejects an
electron diminishes. Thus, a low total energy beam of violet light might eject electrons from a
particular metal, where a high energy red beam fails to eject one. Since each photon in the
red beam has lower energy, there are many more of them. This discovery is what led to the
quantum revolution in physics. Classical physics and intuition both wrongly conclude that the
total energy of the beam would be the most important factor in ejecting electrons. This
phenomenon is important for the physics of photovoltaic cells.

Source:https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Photon#:~:text=A%20photon%20is%20a%20particle,more%20energy%20the%20p
hoton%20has.&text=The%20speed%20of%20light%20(c)%20in%20a%20vacuum%20is%20constant.

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 6
Photon Properties
The basic properties of photons are:

• They have zero mass and rest energy. They only exist as moving
particles.
• They are elementary particles despite lacking rest mass.
• They have no electric charge.
• They are stable.
• They are spin-1 particles which makes them bosons.
• They carry energy and momentum which are dependent on the
frequency.
• They can have interactions with other particles such as electrons, such
as the Compton effect.
• They can be destroyed or created by many natural processes, for
instance when radiation is absorbed or emitted.
• When in empty space, they travel at the speed of light.

History

The nature of light — whether you regard it as a particle or a wave — was one
of the greatest scientific debates. For centuries philosophers and scientists have
argued about the matter that was barely resolved a century ago.

The disciples of a sixth century BC branch of Hindu philosophy

called Vaisheshika had a surprising physical intuition about light. Like the ancient
Greeks, they used to believe the world was based on ‘atoms’ of earth, air, fire, and
water. Light itself was thought to be made of such very fast-moving atoms
called tejas. That’s remarkably similar to our modern theory of light and its
composing photons, a term coined thousands of years later in 1926 by a chemist
named Gilbert Lewis and an optical physicist called Frithiof Wolfers.

Later, around 300 BC, the ancient Greek physicist Euclid made a huge
breakthrough when he posited light travelled in straight lines. Euclid also described
the laws of reflection and, a century later, Ptolemy complemented with writings about
refraction. IT wasn’t until 1021, however, that the laws of refraction were formally
established in the seminal work Kitab al-Manazir, or Book of Optics, by Ibn al-
Haytham.

The Renaissance would usher in a new age of scientific inquiry into the nature
of light. Of note are René Descartes’ incursions in a 1637 essay called La
dioptrique, where he argued that light is made of pulses that propagate

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 7
instantaneously when contacting ‘balls’ in a medium. Later writing in Traité de la
lumière published in 1690, Christiaan Huygens treated light as compressible waves
in an elastic medium, just like sound pressure waves. Huygens showed how to make
reflected, refracted, and screened waves of light and also explained double
refraction.

By this time, scientists had split into two entrenched camps. One side
believed that light was a wave while the other view was of light as particles or
corpuscles. The great champion of the so-called ‘corpuscularists’ was none other
than Isaac Newton, widely believed as the greatest scientist ever. Newton wasn’t
fond at all of the wave theory since that would mean light would be able to stray too
far into the shadow.

For much of the 18th century, corpuscular theory dominated the debate
around the nature of light. But then, in May 1801, Thomas Young introduced the
world to his now famous two-slit experiment where he demonstrated the interference
of light waves.

In the first version of the experiment, Young actually didn’t use two slits, but
rather a single thin card. The physicist simply covered a window with a piece of
paper with a tiny hole in it which served to funnel a thin beam of light. With the card
in his hand, Young witnessed how the beam split in two. Light passing on one side of
the card interfered with light from the other side of the card to create fringes, which
could be observed on the opposite wall. Later, Young used this data to calculate the
wavelengths of various colors of light and came remarkably close to modern values.
The demonstration would provide solid evidence that light was a wave, not a particle.

Meanwhile, this time in France, the corpuscularist movement was gaining

steam after recent developments attributed the polarization of light to some kind of
asymmetry among the light corpuscles. They suffered a great defeat at the hand of
Augustin Fresnel who in 1821 showed that polarization could be explained if light
were a transverse wave with no longitudinal vibration. Previously, Fresnel also came
up with a precise wave theory of diffraction.

By this point, there was little stable ground for Newton’s followers to continue
the debate. It seemed light is a wave and that’s that. The problem was that the
fabled aether — the mysterious medium required to support electromagnetic fields
and to yield Fresnel’s laws of propagation — was missing despite everyone’s best
efforts to find it. No one ever did, actually.

A huge breakthrough came in 1861 when James Clerk Maxwell condensed

experimental and theoretical knowledge about electricity and magnetism in 20
equations. Maxwell predicted an ‘electromagnetic wave’, which can self-sustain,
even in a vacuum, in the absence of conventional currents. This means no aether is

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 8
required for light to propagate! Moreover, he predicted the speed of this wave to be
310,740,000 m s−1 — that’s just a few percent of the exact value of the speed of
light.

“The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are
affections of the same substance, and light is an electromagnetic disturbance
propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws”, wrote Maxwell in
1865. From that day forward, the concept of light was united with those of electricity
and magnetism for the first time.

On December 14, 1900, Max Planck demonstrated that heat radiation was
emitted and absorbed in discrete packets of energy — quanta. Later, Albert Einstein
showed in 1905 that this also applied to light. Einstein used the term Lichtquant, or
quantum of light. Now, at the dawn of the 20th-century, a new revolution in physics
would once again hinge on the nature of light. This time, it’s not about whether light
is a crepuscule or wave. It’s whether it’s both or not.

Modern Theory of Light and Photons

Einstein believed light is a particle (photon) and the flow of photons is a wave.
The German physicist was convinced light had a particle nature following his
discovery of the photoelectric effect, in which electrons fly out of a metal surface
exposed to light. If light was a wave, that couldn’t have happened. Another puzzling
matter is how photoelectrons multiply when strong light is applied. Einstein explained
the photoelectric effect by saying that “light itself is a particle,” for which he would
later receive the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Source:https://lco.global/spacebook/light/lightparticle/#:~:text=Light%20behaves%20mainly%20like%20a,shor
ter%20wavelength%20photons%20have%20more.

The main point of Einstein’s light quantum theory is that light’s energy is
related to its oscillation frequency. He maintained that photons have energy equal to
“Planck’s constant times oscillation frequency,” and this photon energy is the height

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 9
of the oscillation frequency while the intensity of light corresponds to the number of
photons. The various properties of light, which is a type of electromagnetic wave, are
due to the behavior of extremely small particles called photons that are invisible to
the naked eye. Einstein speculated that when electrons within matter collide with
photons, the former takes the latter’s energy and flies out and that the higher the
oscillation frequency of the photons that strike, the greater the electron energy that
will come flying out. Some of you have a working proof of this idea in your very own
home — it’s the solar panels! In short, he was saying that light is a flow of photons,
the energy of these photons is the height of their oscillation frequency, and the
intensity of the light is related to the number of photons.

Einstein was able to prove his theory by deriving Planck’s constant from his
experiments on the photoelectric effect. His calculations rendered a Planck’s
constant value of 6.6260755 x 10-34 which is exactly what Max Planck obtained in
1900 through his research on electromagnetic waves. Unequivocally, this pointed to
an intimate relationship between the properties and the oscillation frequency of light
as a wave and the properties and momentum of light as a particle. Later, during the
1920s, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger elaborated on these ideas with his
equation for the quantum wave function to describe what a wave looks like. More
than a hundred years since Einstein showed the double nature of light, Swiss
physicists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne captured the first-ever
snapshot of this dual behavior. The team led by Fabrizio Carbone performed a clever
experiment in 2015 in which a laser was used to fire onto a nanowire, causing
electrons to vibrate. Light travels along this tiny wire in two possible directions, like
cars on a highway. When waves traveling in opposite directions meet each other
they form a new wave that looks like it is standing in place. Here, this standing wave
becomes the source of light for the experiment, radiating around the nanowire. The
fired a new beam of electrons to image the standing wave of light, which acts as a
fingerprint of the wave-nature of light.

Facts About Photons

▪ Not only is light made up of photons, but all electromagnetic energy (i.e.
microwaves, radio waves, X-rays) is made up of photons.
▪ The original concept of the photon was developed by Albert Einstein. However,
it was scientist Gilbert N. Lewis who first used the word “photon” to describe it.
▪ The theory that states that light behaves both like a wave and a particle is
called the wave-particle duality theory.
▪ Photons are always electrically neutral. They have no electrical charge.
▪ Photons do not decay on their own.
Source: Puiu, Tibi (2007), What exactly is a photon, https://www.zmescience.com/science/what-
isphotondefinition04322/#:~:text=A%20photon%20is%20the%20smallest,denoted%20by%20the%20letter%20c.

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 10
Learning Activity 3: Let’s Apply

Directions: Answer the following questions.

• Why does photographers used red light in producing pictures in
the dark room?

• Why do people get sunburned by ultraviolet light?

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 11
IV. Answer Key
Learning Activity No. 1

1. An excellent comparison of the wave and particle theories involves the

differences that occur when light is reflected from a smooth, specular
surface, such as a mirror. Wave theory speculates that a light source emits
light waves that spread in all directions. Upon impacting a mirror, the waves
are reflected according to the arrival angles, but with each wave turned back
to front to produce a reversed image

2. When a beam of light travels between two media having different refractive
indices, the beam undergo refraction, and changes direction when it passes
from the first medium into the second. To determine whether the light beam
is composed of waves or particles, a model for each can be devised to
explain the phenomenon (Picture B). According to Huygens' wave theory, a
small portion of each angled wavefront should impact the second medium
before the rest of the front reaches the interface. This portion will start to
move through the second medium while the rest of the wave is still traveling
in the first medium, but will move more slowly due to the higher refractive
index of the second medium. Because the wavefront is now traveling at two
different speeds, it will bend into the second medium, thus changing the
angle of propagation.

3. When a light wave strikes a smooth interface separating two transparent

materials (such as air, glass or water), the light wave is somewhat reflected
and partly refracted into the second medium or material, as shown in Figure
1. For example, when you look into a glass window in the mall from the
street, you see a reflection of the street scene, but a person inside the mall
can look out through the glass window at the same scene as light reaches
him or her by refraction.

Learning Activity No. 2

1) EUCLID 2) DESCARTERS 3) HUYGENS 4)MAXWELL 5) EINSTEIN

RO_Physical Science_Q2_LP_3 12
V. References
Cutnell, J. & Johnson K. (2009). Physics. 8th Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,111 River
Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774

Hewitt, P. (2006). Conceptual Physics. 10th Edition. 300 Beach Drive NE, 1103, St.
Petersburg, FL 33701.

Sutter, R. Matthew J. Parry-Hill and Davidson, M. Refraction and Reflection of Light -

National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, 1800 East Paul Dirac Dr., The Florida
State University, Tallahassee, Florida, 32310. Retrieved from
https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/particleorwave/refraction/index.html

The Cause of Refraction. (2020). Retrieved from

https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/refrn/Lesson-1/The-Cause-of-
Refraction

Young, D and Freedman, R. (2014) Sears and Zemansky's University Physics with
Modern Physics Technology Update. Thirteenth Edition. p.1197-1198.

Walker, J., Halliday, D., Resnick, R. Fundamental of Physics. 10th Edition. ,John Wiley &
Sons,Inc.,111 River Street,Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774

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