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[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 ...
The wave function presents a much different explanation of the observed light and dark bands in a double slit experiment. In this conception, the photon follows a path which is a probabilistic choice of one of many possible paths in the electromagnetic field.
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 ...
The original Arago spot experiment was carried out a decade later and was the deciding experiment on the question of whether light is a particle or a wave. It is thus an example of an experimentum crucis. At that time, many favored Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory of light, among them the theoretician Siméon Denis Poisson. [10]
The experimental confirmation was reported in a "postscript" to the work in which Fresnel first revealed his theory that light waves, including "unpolarized" waves, were purely transverse. [ 23 ] Details of Fresnel's derivation, including the modern forms of the sine law and tangent law, were given later, in a memoir read to the French Academy ...
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.
Thomas Young's double-slit experiment in 1801 showed that light can act as a wave, helping to invalidate early particle theories of light. [26]: 964 In most theories up to the eighteenth century, light was pictured as being made of particles.
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 ...