Session 5: Writing Exercise

For your submission, use the following format: braille your name, email, and institution in the top right-hand corner in the first space, with runovers in Cell Three. Begin brailling on Line Five.

Submit your braille either via email. Electronic braille (Mac/PCBrailler, Duxbury, Edgar, Megadots, Pokadots) should be sent via email to rbroadnax@shodor.org. You can also use the text box at the bottom of this page to submit your work. Simply cut and paste the braille into the box, then click on the "Submit braille" button.

No hardcopy braille is accepted. All submissions must be done electronically, using any of the braille preparation software packages (Duxbury, Megadots, Edgar, Pokadot, etc.)

This page is from the textbook "Modern Physics" (the instructors edition), page 54, Chapter 2: The Quantum Theory of Light.

54 2 THE QUANTUM THEORY OF LIGHT Note to instructor: students need to understand the fundamental physical principles and mathematics of the photoelectric effect, with an emphasis on blackbody radiation.

2.5 LIGHT QUANTIZATION AND THE PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT We now turn to the year 1905, in which the next important development in quantum theory took place. The year 1905 was an incredible one for the "willing revolutionary" Albert Einstein. In this year Einstein produced three immortal papers on three different topics, each revolutionary, and each worth of a Nobel Prize in itself. All three papers contained balanced, symmetric, and unifying new results achieved by spare and clean logic and simple mathematics. The first work, entitled "A Heuristic7 Point of View About the Generation and Transformation of Light," formulated the theory of light quanta, and explained the photoelectric effect8. The second paper was entitled "On the Motion of Particles Suspended in Liquids as Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat." It explained Brownian motion and provided strong proof of the reality of atoms.9 The third paper, which is perhaps his most famous, contains the invention of the theory of special relativity.10 7A heuristic argument is one that is plausible and enlightening but not rigorously justified. 8A. Einstein, Ann. Physik, 17: 132, 1905 (March). 9A. Einstein, Ann. Physik, 17: 132, 1905 (March). 10Einstein, as Planck before him, fell back on the unquestionable solidity of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to derive his revolutionary results. At the time it was well known that the probability of some number of independent gas atoms to in a partial volume is derived from the volume divided by the initial volume raised to the power of the number of total atoms.