Photon: New light on an old name

Helge Kragh

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arXiv · 1401.0293

Photon: New light on an old name

Helge Kragh

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Abstract

After G. N. Lewis (1875-1946) proposed the term "photon" in 1926, many physicists adopted it as a more apt name for Einstein's light quantum. However, Lewis' photon was a concept of a very different kind, something few physicists knew or cared about. It turns out that Lewis' name was not quite the neologism that it has usually been assumed to be. The same name was proposed or used earlier, apparently independently, by at least four scientists. Three of the four early proposals were related to physiology or visual perception, and only one to quantum physics. Priority belongs to the American physicist and psychologist L. T. Troland (1889-1932), who coined the word in 1916, and five years later it was independently introduced by the Irish physicist J. Joly (1857-1933). Then in 1925 a French physiologist, Rene Wurmser (1890-1993), wrote about the photon, and in July 1926 his compatriot, the physicist F. Wolfers (ca. 1890-1971), did the same in the context of optical physics. None of the four pre-Lewis versions of "photon" was well known and they were soon forgotten.

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Helge Kragh. 2014-01-01. Photon: New light on an old name. https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0293

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