Once a hypothesis has survived to test, it may become adopted into the framework of a scientific theory. This is a logically reasoned, self-consistent model, or framework for describing the behavior of certain natural phenomena. A theory typically describes the behavior of much broader sets of phenomena than a hypothesis; commonly, a large number of hypotheses can be logically bound together by a single theory. Thus a theory is a hypothesis explaining various other hypotheses. In that vein, theories are formulated according to most of the same scientific principles as hypotheses.
The photoelectric effect refers to the emission, or ejection, of electrons from the surface of, generally, a metal in response to incident light. Energy contained within the incident light is absorbed by electrons within the metal, giving the electrons sufficient energy to be 'knocked' out of, that is, emitted from, the surface of the metal. Using the classical Maxwell wave theory of light, the more intense the incident light the greater the energy with which the electrons should be ejected from the metal. That is, the average energy carried by an ejected (photoelectric) electron should increase with the intensity of the incident light. In fact, Lénard found that this was not so. Rather, he found the energies of the emitted electrons to be independent of the intensity of the incident radiation. Einstein (1905) successfully resolved this paradox by proposing that the incident light consisted of individual quanta, called photons, that interacted with the electr...
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