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Huygens intended to publish his results as part of the Dioptrica but decided to separate his theory of light from the rest of the work at the last minute, marking the transition from geometrical to physical optics. [9] More than a century later, it would take Étienne Malus and others fifteen years to reconstruct Huygens's ideas of rays and ...
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.
Descartes' second model on light uses his theory of the elements to demonstrate the rectilinear transmission of light as well as the movement of light through solid objects. He uses a metaphor of wine flowing through a vat of grapes, then exiting through a hole at the bottom of the vat.
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 ...
Augustin-Jean Fresnel submitted a thesis based on wave theory and whose substance consisted of a synthesis of the Huygens' principle and Young's principle of interference. [2] Poisson studied Fresnel's theory in detail and of course looked for a way to prove it wrong being a supporter of the particle theory of light.
Issues in Huygens-Fresnel theory continue to be of interest. In 1991, David A. B. Miller suggested that treating the source as a dipole (not the monopole assumed by Huygens) will cancel waves propagating in the reverse direction, making Huygens' construction quantiatively correct. [10]
Much of the behaviour of light can be modelled using classical wave theory. The Huygens–Fresnel principle is one such model; it states that each point on a wavefront generates a secondary wavelet, and that the disturbance at any subsequent point can be found by summing the contributions of the individual wavelets at that point.
In the late 1660s and early 1670s, Isaac Newton expanded Descartes's ideas into a corpuscle theory of light, famously determining that white light was a mix of colours that can be separated into its component parts with a prism. In 1690, Christiaan Huygens proposed a wave theory for light based on suggestions that had been made by Robert Hooke ...