Light, What is it, How is it, Why is it and Does it Enjoy Poker?

Whoever designed this universe needs some consistency. Light can be both a particle and a wave? How does that make any sense? Well, paraphrasing from what someone once said in response to my short rant on light, perhaps it is not that it does not make sense but what our perception of what should make sense is wrong. Though his words are something to consider, other possibilities do exist for explaining away the nature of light, some which make sense, some which don’t, all of which require a change in perspective.

Newton and Christiaan

Isaac Newton believed that light was made out of particles, point-like objects, corpuscles, minute bodies of light, traversing through the universe by way of a medium extending through all space that he called the aether where white light was simply different colored corpuscles of light which appeared to observers as white. Newton argued that phenomena such as reflection and refraction could only be explained by light being a particle as particles were able to travel in straight lines while waves do not tend to be able to travel in straight lines. Christiaan Huygens believed otherwise. He thought that light was a wave and travels through a medium by way of a wavefront. Both were able to use their ideas of what light was to explain phenomena observed in the real world such as diffraction, refraction and reflection yet for some time, only Newton was able to prove his theory experimentally using two prisms of glass, a slit and a glass.

The sun was out and Newton would darken his room, making a small hole in his window-shuts where light from outside would pass through into a convex lens which would bend the white light to eventually meet at a point where a prism, a common child’s toy at the time, was located.

This prism caused the white light to split into components of the white light, the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. To get an even clearer look at the different colors produced by splitting the white light, Newton used a second prism to increase the distance between the colors produced. This proved Newton’s hypothesis that white light only appeared white and was actually made up of colored corpuscles of light, making Newton’s theory on the particle nature of light seem more right than Huygen’s theory and, with the help of Newton’s already great reputation as a physicist, his theory was accepted as the right one for many years to come. Newton’s theory would not stand the test of time however and Thomas Young would come to prove Huygens right, sort of. We’ll get to that in the next article.