Wave theory and corpuscular theory

The Newtonian view of the universe may be described as a mechanistic interpretation. All components of the universe, small or large, obey the laws of mechanics, and all phenomena are in the last analysis based on matter in motion. A conceptual difficulty in Newtonian mechanics, however, is the way in which the gravitational force between two massive objects acts over a distance across empty space. Newton did not address this question, but many of his contemporaries hypothesized that the gravitational force was mediated through an invisible and frictionless medium which Aristotle had called the ether (or aether). The problem is that everyday experience of natural phenomena shows mechanical things to be moved by forces which make contact. Any cause and effect without a discernible contact, or “action at a distance,” contradicts common sense and has been an unacceptable notion since antiquity. Whenever the nature of the transmission of certain actions and effects over a distance was not yet understood, the ether was resorted to as a conceptual solution of the transmitting medium. By necessity, any description of how the ether functioned remained vague, but its existence was required by common sense and thus not questioned.

In Newton’s day, light was one phenomenon, besides gravitation, whose effects were apparent at large distances from its source. Newton contributed greatly to the scientific knowledge of light. His experiments revealed that white light is a composite of many colours, which can be dispersed by a prism and reunited to again yield white light. The propagation of light along straight lines convinced him that it consists of tiny particles which emanate at high or infinite speed from the light source. The first observation from which a finite speed of light was deduced was made soon thereafter, in 1676, by the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer (see below Speed of light).

Observations of two phenomena strongly suggested that light propagates as waves. One of these involved interference by thin films, which was discovered in England independently by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. The other had to do with the diffraction of light in the geometric shadow of an opaque screen. The latter was also discovered by Hooke, who published a wave theory of light in 1665 to explain it.

The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens greatly improved the wave theory and explained reflection and refraction in terms of what is now called Huygens’ principle. According to this principle (published in 1690), each point on a wave front in the hypothetical ether or in an optical medium is a source of a new spherical light wave and the wave front is the envelope of all the individual wavelets that originate from the old wave front.

In 1669 another Danish scientist, Erasmus Bartholin, discovered the polarization of light by double refraction in Iceland spar (calcite). This finding had a profound effect on the conception of the nature of light. At that time, the only waves known were those of sound, which are longitudinal. It was inconceivable to both Newton and Huygens that light could consist of transverse waves in which vibrations are perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Huygens gave a satisfactory account of double refraction by proposing that the asymmetry of the structure of Iceland spar causes the secondary wavelets to be ellipsoidal instead of spherical in his wave front construction. Since Huygens believed in longitudinal waves, he failed, however, to understand the phenomena associated with polarized light. Newton, on the other hand, used these phenomena as the bases for an additional argument for his corpuscular theory of light. Particles, he argued in 1717, have “sides” and can thus exhibit properties that depend on the directions perpendicular to the direction of motion.

It may be surprising that Huygens did not make use of the phenomenon of interference to support his wave theory; but for him waves were actually pulses instead of periodic waves with a certain wavelength. One should bear in mind that the word wave may have a very different conceptual meaning and convey different images at various times to different people.

It took nearly a century before a new wave theory was formulated by the physicists Thomas Young of England and Augustin-Jean Fresnel of France. Based on his experiments on interference, Young realized for the first time that light is a transverse wave. Fresnel then succeeded in explaining all optical phenomena known at the beginning of the 19th century with a new wave theory. No proponents of the corpuscular light theory remained. Nonetheless, it is always satisfying when a competing theory is discarded on grounds that one of its principal predictions is contradicted by experiment. The corpuscular theory explained the refraction of light passing from a medium of given density to a denser one in terms of the attraction of light particles into the latter. This means the light velocity should be larger in the denser medium. Huygens’ construction of wave fronts waving across the boundary between two optical media predicted the opposite—that is to say, a smaller light velocity in the denser medium. The measurement of the light velocity in air and water by Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau and independently by Léon Foucault during the mid-19th century decided the case in favour of the wave theory (see below Speed of light).

The transverse wave nature of light implied that the ether must be a solid elastic medium. The larger velocity of light suggested, moreover, a great elastic stiffness of this medium. Yet, it was recognized that all celestial bodies move through the ether without encountering such difficulties as friction. These conceptual problems remained unsolved until the beginning of the 20th century.