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…
To do this he had to show that the points argued by Newton were either moot or incorrect. This meant showing that light is capable of diffraction when passing through openings or around obstacles. In order to do this he utilised the work of Italian mathematician and physicist Francesco Grimaldi, who demonstrated that the passage of light cannot be reconciled with rectilinear motion by shining light through a hole and observing a conical shape as opposed to the cylindrical shape one would expect to see. A common example of this can be found by observing a shadow, the edges of which are “fuzzy”. If light was incapable of diffraction and travelled solely in straight lines, the edges of a shadow would be perfectly defined. He developed these ideas further into what is now known as Huygen’s Theory of Wave Propagation which states that the waves of light can be considered to be an infinite number of smaller waves — which he referred to as wavelets — and that the sum of these “wavelets” determines the form of the wave at any given time. Despite all of this his ideas garnered little consideration by scientists at the time as most were still accustomed to blindly follow the word of …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 in fact 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