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Asked by Hi to Ed, Guido, Hugh, Stef on 18 Mar 2015.
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Guido Bolognesi answered on 18 Mar 2015:
Hi Hi
😀 😀It was good to speak you today in the chat.
I think Christian Huygens was among the first to argue about the wave
nature of light. In the 17th century, he wrote an essay called “Traité de la lumiere” , which in English means “Treatise on light”, where he discussed his thoughts about light being a wave rather than something made of particles (as Newton did).
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Hugh Harvey answered on 18 Mar 2015:
Guido probably has the right answer – although Archemedes in ancient Greece did think about light being made of matter, but he didn’t know about photons back then!
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Ed Rial answered on 18 Mar 2015:
Guido gets the cookie on this one!
I think Huygens referred to light as wavelets and (after I admit researching it a little bit to refresh my memory). He thought that light waves were longitudinal waves and needed a medium to travel in (like sound needs air) and he suggested that the universe was filled with a material that you couldn’t detect called the Aether.
Most scientists at the time didn’t believe him, the aether needed to be too strange to be real. Later two physicists called Michelson and Morley proved the aether did not exist.
In the early 1800s a scientist called Fresnel suggested that light was a transverse wave (like waves on a string), and a lot of the maths he developed to describe light we still use today. But he still didn’t know what transmitted these waves.
It wasn’t until Faraday figured out in 1847 that light was composed of electromagnetic waves that the final wave theory of light fell in to place. It was a long and complicated story!
Ed
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