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Huygens' theory served as a fundamental explanation of the wave nature of light interference and was further developed by Fresnel and Young but did not fully resolve all observations such as the low-intensity double-slit experiment first performed by G. I. Taylor in 1909.
Treatise on Light: In Which Are Explained the Causes of That Which Occurs in Reflection & Refraction (French: Traité de la Lumière: Où sont expliquées les causes de ce qui luy arrive dans la reflexion & dans la refraction) is a book written by Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens that was published in French in 1690.
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, FRS (/ ˈ h aɪ ɡ ən z / HY-gənz, [2] US also / ˈ h ɔɪ ɡ ən z / HOY-gənz; [3] Dutch: [ˈkrɪstijaːn ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] ⓘ; also spelled Huyghens; Latin: Hugenius; 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution.
Huygens principle of double refraction, named after Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, explains the phenomenon of double refraction observed in uniaxial anisotropic material such as calcite. When unpolarized light propagates in such materials (along a direction different from the optical axis ), it splits into two different rays, known as ...
It is an extension of Huygens–Fresnel principle, which describes each point on a wavefront as a spherical wave source. The equivalence of the imaginary surface currents are enforced by the uniqueness theorem in electromagnetism, which dictates that a unique solution can be determined by fixing a boundary condition on a system.
In 1690, Christiaan Huygens proposed a wave theory for light based on suggestions that had been made by Robert Hooke in 1664. Hooke himself publicly criticised Newton's theories of light and the feud between the two lasted until Hooke's death.
In Young's own judgment, of his many achievements the most important was to establish the wave theory of light set out by Christiaan Huygens in his Treatise on Light (1690). [33] [34] To do so, he had to overcome the century-old view, expressed in the venerable Newton's Opticks, that light is a particle. Nevertheless, in the early 19th century ...
Augustin-Jean Fresnel [Note 1] (10 May 1788 – 14 July 1827) was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s [3] until the end of the 19th century.