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This theory came to dominate the conceptions of light in the eighteenth century, displacing the previously prominent vibration theories, where light was viewed as "pressure" of the medium between the source and the receiver, first championed by René Descartes, and later in a more refined form by Christiaan Huygens. [1]
The early presentation of the work to the Royal Society stimulated a bitter dispute between Newton and Robert Hooke over the "corpuscular" or particle theory of light, which prompted Newton to postpone publication of the work until after Hooke's death in 1703.
Later, Fresnel independently worked out his own wave theory of light and presented it to the Académie des Sciences in 1817. Siméon Denis Poisson added to Fresnel's mathematical work to produce a convincing argument in favor of the wave theory, helping to overturn Newton's corpuscular theory.
The corpuscular theory of light, developed by Isaac Newton in his Opticks, which proposed the existence of light particles which are now known as photons; A term used by J. J. Thomson to describe particles now known to be electrons, in his plum pudding model; A small free-floating biological cell, especially a blood cell
The corpuscular theory of light is eventually attributed to Newton and purportedly communicated in Opticks. However (checking the 1730 edition ): - Newton started the book explicitly defining "a Ray of Light" as the smallest part of light (p. 2).
Young's experiment, performed in the early 1800s, played a crucial role in the understanding of the wave theory of light, vanquishing the corpuscular theory of light proposed by Isaac Newton, which had been the accepted model of light propagation in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Prior to the 19th century, light was believed to consist of discrete packets called corpuscles. During the early 19th century, many scientists began to disregard the corpuscular theory in favor of the wave theory of light. Biot began his work on polarization to show that the results he was obtaining could appear only if light were made of ...
1704 – Isaac Newton publishes Opticks, a corpuscular theory of light and colour; 1705 – Francis Hauksbee improves von Guericke's electrostatic generator by using a glass globe and generates the first sparks by approaching his finger to the rubbed globe.