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In the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton had advocated that light was particles, but Christiaan Huygens took an opposing wave approach. While Newton had favored a particle approach, he was the first to attempt to reconcile both wave and particle theories of light, and the only one in his time to consider both, thereby anticipating modern wave-particle duality.
[3] [4] [5] Thomas Young's experiment with light was part of classical physics long before the development of quantum mechanics and the concept of wave–particle duality. He believed it demonstrated that the Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light was correct, and his experiment is sometimes referred to as Young's experiment [6] or Young's ...
Augustin-Jean Fresnel submitted a thesis based on wave theory and whose substance consisted of a synthesis of the Huygens' principle and Young's principle of interference. [2] Poisson studied Fresnel's theory in detail and of course looked for a way to prove it wrong being a supporter of the particle theory of light.
The fact that light could be polarized was for the first time qualitatively explained by Newton using the particle theory. Étienne-Louis Malus in 1810 created a mathematical particle theory of polarization. Jean-Baptiste Biot in 1812 showed that this theory explained all known phenomena of light polarization. At that time polarization was ...
The particle theory of light led Pierre-Simon Laplace to argue that a body could be so massive that light could not escape from it. In other words, it would become what is now called a black hole . Laplace withdrew his suggestion later, after a wave theory of light became firmly established as the model for light (as has been explained, neither ...
The pivotal question then, was how to unify Maxwell's wave theory of light with its experimentally observed particle nature. The answer to this question occupied Albert Einstein for the rest of his life, [57] and was solved in quantum electrodynamics and its successor, the Standard Model. (See § Quantum field theory and § As a gauge boson ...
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This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics. De Broglie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929, after the wave-like behaviour of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927.