Newton's Argument On The Nature Of Light

In the early part of the 19th century the scientific community was in the midst of a debate regarding the nature of light, specifically whether it was a particle or a wave. Isaac Newton argued that light behaved like a particle whilst a man by the name of Christian Huygens argued that light was in fact a wave. Unfortunately, as Newton was the president of the Royal Society at the time and many other scientists would simply take what he said to be the truth, this meant that few scientists of the era actually considered his proposal.

Newton’s theory was based off of Pierre Gassendi and Thomas Hobbes corpuscular theory of light. Newton stated that the concept of diffraction was simply a new kind of refraction and that the wave theory of light …show more content…
Fresnel was a believer the controversial wave theory and entered the competition to express his idea that light is wave and thus, just as any wave it can essentially bend around an object. One of the judges was Simeon Poisson, an avid believer in Newton's corpuscular theory of light. He stated that Fresnel's explanation was utter nonsense because it would mean that at the centre of a shadow cast by a circular object would be a bright spot. He never actually went on to test that as he considered the notion too absurd to bother with. Experiments conducted today however do infact show that in the centre of a shadow cast by a circular object is a bright spot, this happens thanks to superposition and proves that diffraction can be explained using the wave theory of light but not that the wave theory of light is correct in the first place. It took the work Thomas Young and his famous double slit experiment to definitively show the wave nature of light in a manner that would force others to …show more content…
This experiment would come to be known as Young’s Double Slit Experiment. When Young initially performed the experiment he used sunlight focused through a single slit which would cause the light to expand out from the slit in a single uniform wave in accordance with Huygen’s Theory of Wave Propagation. This wave would then travel to a second barrier with a pair of slits. From there the light would expand out into two separate waves – both still in phase – from the two slits. These waves would then interfere with each other in a very specific pattern on an observation screen, causing bright spots and dark spots to appear in a symmetrical way with the light fading as it moved further from the brightest spot which was in the direct centre, between the two slits. This ultimately proved that light behaved like a wave as unlike particles, waves can move through each other, as evidenced by the interference patterns. Later on it was shown that light can take on properties of both waves and particles in what would come to be known as the wave-particle