Overview

The nature of light is a very old issue in the history of science, dating back at least to Greek times. The prevalent belief among eighteenth-century natural philosophers was that light was made up of particles, not waves. The revival of the wave theory of light in the early nineteenth century is largely a tale of two cities, with Thomas Young (1773-1829)discovering the law of interference in London followed by the development of the mathematical wave theory by Augustin Fresnel (1788-1827) in Paris. The rise of the wave theory during the first three decades of the century is often regarded as a revolution in science. It exemplified a new style of scientific reasoning, with abstract mathematical models taking precedence over intuitive mechanical analogies for...