What does the planck's equation e equals h x nu state?

Answer 1

This equation shows that the energy of a photon is inversely proportional to its wavelength.

E = Energy.

h = The Planck constant. Think of it as a tiny, discrete packet of energy for most purposes.

Nu (looks like v) = Spatial frequency of a wave.

Nu is equal to 1/Wavelength (inversely proportional). The way to think of this is that wavelength is how many meters long the wave is. Meanwhile, Nu is how many waves you can fit into a meter.

Eg: If the wave is half a meter long, you can fit 2 waves into a metre. (Nu = 1/0.5 = 2)

If Nu is large, it means we can fit a lot of waves into our unit length (remember, big Nu = small wavelength and vice versa). What does this mean for our equation? It means when Nu is high, we have high energy (remember h is a positive constant). When Nu is low, we have low energy.

In English, this means photons with smaller wavelength have higher energy than photons with larger wavelengths. This universally true, and extremely important.

For further reading, try searching for "Electromagnetic spectrum".