![]() Disappointed at the response to his research on light, Young decided to focus on medicine, though he was never very successful as a physician. “Much as I venerate the name of Newton, I am not therefore obliged to believe that he was infallible,” Young wrote in response to one critic. He also presented an analogy with sound waves and with water waves, and even developed a demonstration wave tank to show interference patterns in water.ĭespite Young’s convincing experiment, people didn’t want to believe Newton was wrong. In that lecture, he described interference of light waves and the slit experiment. In November 1801 Young presented his paper, titled “On the theory of light and color” to the Royal Society. Young also used his data to calculate the wavelengths of different colors of light, coming very close to modern values. Light passing on one side of the card interfered with light from the other side of the card to create fringes, which Young observed on the opposite wall. He held the card in the light beam, splitting the beam in two. A thin beam of light passed through the hole. He covered a window with a piece of paper with a tiny hole in it. In the first version of the experiment, Young actually didn’t use two slits, but rather a single thin card. The demonstration would provide solid evidence that light was a wave, not a particle. In May of 1801, while pondering some of Newton’s experiments, Young came up with the basic idea for the now-famous double-slit experiment to demonstrate the interference of light waves. ![]() While he didn’t immediately look for the optical equivalent of beats, he began to realize that light might exhibit interference phenomena as well. He noticed that when two waves of sound cross, they interfere with each other, producing beats. Sound was known to be a compression wave in air Young thought light might be similar. The corpuscular theory also has trouble explaining why different colors of light are refracted to different degrees, Young noted. For instance, he noticed that at interfaces such as that between air and water, some light is reflected and some is refracted, but the corpuscular theory can’t easily explain why that happens. By 1800 Young saw some problems with Newton’s corpuscular theory. Young had first read Newton’s Opticks in 1790 at age 17, and had admired Newton’s work. His studies of the eye and ear led naturally to his interest in studying sound and light. In addition, he was fascinated by languages, and he completed a dissertation on the human voice in which he came up with a 47 letter alphabet that covered all human sounds. He also proposed a theory of color vision. In 1801 Young was appointed to a lectureship at the recently-formed Royal Institution in London, where he gave a series of lectures on a variety of topics.Īs part of his medical studies, Young had dissected an ox eye in order to figure out how the eye focuses on objects at different distances. He began studying medicine in 1792, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1794. He was a prodigy as a child, learning to read by age two, and teaching himself Latin at age six. He was born in 1773 in Milverton, in southwest England, into a large Quaker family. Young was a true polymath, with interests ranging from physics to Egyptology. In 1801 Thomas Young presented a serious challenge to Newton’s ideas on the nature of light. Newton was so greatly revered as a scientist that it was nearly impossible for anyone to dispute his theory. Newton was also intrigued and puzzled by colored fringes in soap films, but stuck to the corpuscular theory despite its difficulties. Newton had to invoke an inexplicable force that changed the velocity of light in water. But phenomena such as refraction were difficult to explain with the corpuscular theory. For instance, sound, known then to be a wave, can travel through crooked pipes and around corners, while light cannot, and this fact was taken as evidence for the corpuscular theory of light. At that time, a few scientists, most notably Dutch physicist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens, thought light was a wave vibrating in some sort of ether. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton believed light was composed of a stream of corpuscles. The debate over whether light is a wave or a particle goes back many centuries.
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