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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.
This theory came to dominate the conceptions of light in the eighteenth century, displacing the previously prominent vibration theories, where light was viewed as "pressure" of the medium between the source and the receiver, first championed by René Descartes, and later in a more refined form by Christiaan Huygens. [1]
The Huygens–Fresnel principle (named after Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel) states that every point on a wavefront is itself the source of spherical wavelets, and the secondary wavelets emanating from different points mutually interfere. [1] The sum of these spherical wavelets forms a new wavefront.
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.
In the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton had advocated that light was corpuscular (particulate), but Christiaan Huygens took an opposing wave description. While Newton had favored a particle approach, he was the first to attempt to reconcile both wave and particle theories of light, and the only one in his time to consider both, thereby anticipating modern wave-particle duality.
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 ...
Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel showed that the wave theory Christiaan Huygens described in his Treatise on Light (1690) could prove that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Science also slowly came to recognize the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics.
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) worked out a mathematical wave theory of light in 1678 and published it in his Treatise on Light in 1690. He proposed that light was emitted in all directions as a series of waves in a medium called the luminiferous aether. As waves are not affected by gravity, it was assumed that they slowed down upon entering ...