Submitted by TheGandPTurtle t3_111g7s9 in askscience
Leemour t1_j9110bn wrote
Reply to comment by Weed_O_Whirler in Light traveling through a medium that slows it. Does the same photon emerge? by TheGandPTurtle
>The most common complaint is that an atom can only absorb very specific wavelengths, but light of all wavelengths is slowed down by materials
Yeah, but not slowed at the same rate (dispersion), which is where I think quantum treatment of the system may be more insightful. Truth is that there is a fundamental problem of trying to account for everything on the very small scale (scattering, absorption, phonon interactions etc.) to match observations on the large scale ( "simple" intensity and spectral measurements, maybe with a clock).
It's like having a large container of 100+ tennis balls, and then trying to predict where they all land if the container is flipped. I think it's unfair to dismiss the insights of the dynamics of a single tennis ball, but clearly it's not enough to predict how the group collectively behaves.
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