From: JASA 19 (June 1967): 33-35. Physicists at the beginning of
this century were confronted by radically conflicting
experimental behavior: Light exhibited clear wave-like behavior
in interference and diffraction effects; yet in other
experiments, such as the photo-electric effect, certain
particle-like behavior was observed. To compound the difficulty
it was soon discovered that micro-world particles such as
electrons exhibited wave-like behavior by forming diffraction
patterns upon scattering *W. Jim Neidhardt is with the Physics
Department, Newark College of Engineering, Newark, New Jersey.
How has this problem been resolved to date? Part of the
difficulty may be due to applying our understanding of one realm
of experience to another, different realm. We live in a "large"
world of basketballs, drops of water, ocean waves, . . . As we
cannot have direct contact with the "little" world of atoms, we
choose to apply our "large" world concepts hoping they may fit.
Is it not then reasonable to expect that if w