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The experiment belongs to a general class of "double path" experiments, in which a wave is split into two separate waves (the wave is typically made of many photons and better referred to as a wave front, not to be confused with the wave properties of the individual photon) that later combine into a single wave.
The weakness of the wave theory was that light waves, like sound waves, would need a medium for transmission. The existence of the hypothetical substance luminiferous aether proposed by Huygens in 1678 was cast into strong doubt in the late nineteenth century by the Michelson–Morley experiment.
The Michelson–Morley experiment was an attempt to measure the motion of the Earth relative to the luminiferous aether, [A 1] a supposed medium permeating space that was thought to be the carrier of light waves. The experiment was performed between April and July 1887 by American physicists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley at what is ...
A century later, Thomas Young [a] and Augustin-Jean Fresnel revived the wave theory of light when they pointed out that light could be a transverse wave rather than a longitudinal wave; the polarization of a transverse wave (like Newton's "sides" of light) could explain birefringence, and in the wake of a series of experiments on diffraction ...
In 1803, Young's interference experiment played a major role in the general acceptance of the wave theory of light. If white light is used in Young's experiment, the result is a white central band of constructive interference corresponding to equal path length from the two slits, surrounded by a symmetrical pattern of colored fringes of ...
Similarly, seeing non-luminous objects requires light hitting the object to cause it to reflect that light. While the effects of observation are often negligible, the object still experiences a change (leading to the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment). This effect can be found in many domains of physics, but can usually be reduced to ...
Some experiments display both the wave and particle natures of electromagnetic waves, such as the self-interference of a single photon. [21] When a single photon is sent through an interferometer , it passes through both paths, interfering with itself, as waves do, yet is detected by a photomultiplier or other sensitive detector only once.
An example of spectroscopy: a prism analyses white light by dispersing it into its component colors. Spectroscopy is the field of study that measures and interprets electromagnetic spectra . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In narrower contexts, spectroscopy is the precise study of color as generalized from visible light to all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.