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Sam said:
Indeed! All that is required is a good imagination.
<<Now, does not the prize to Einstein imply
that the Academy recognised the particle
nature of light? The Nobel Committee says
that Einstein had found that the energy exchange
between matter and ether occurs by atoms emitting
or absorbing a quantum of energy,hv .
As a consequence of the new concept of light quanta
(in modern terminology photons) Einstein proposed the
law that an electron emitted from a substance by
monochromatic light with the frequency has to have
a maximum energy of E=hv-p, where p is the energy needed to
remove the electron from the substance. Robert Andrews
Millikan carried out a series of measurements over a
period of 10 years, finally confirming the validity of this
law in 1916 with great accuracy. Millikan had, however,
found the idea of light quanta to be unfamiliar and strange.
The Nobel Committee avoids committing itself to the
particle concept. Light-quanta or with modern terminology,
photons, were explicitly mentioned in the reports on
which the prize decision rested only in connection with
emission and absorption processes. The Committee says
that the most important application of Einstein's photoelectric
law and also its most convincing confirmation has come from
the use Bohr made of it in his theory of atoms, which explains
a vast amount of spectroscopic data. >>
http://nobelprize.org/physics/articles/ekspong/index.html
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