The Controversy Surrounding The Huygens Theory Of Light

c) There remained one problem that Huygens theory of light could not solve, which also led to why his theory was not accepted by the science community. Erasmus Bartholin as Danish physicist had begun experimenting with transparent calcite crystals. He found in his results that when an image is places behind a crystal the same image appears slightly higher than the other. When the crystal is rotated, he saw that image disappeared while the other rotated with it. This lead Batholin to conclude that there had to be something in the crystal that had split the beam of light into two different rays. He found that this was advocating Huygens wave theory. However Huygens argued that the results from the experiment could be explained if the crystal contained two different materials, one that produces spherical waves and one that produces ellipsoidal waves. Huygens continued on with Bartholins experiments and concluded that if two crystals were placed beside each other than the number of images varied, dependent on if the crystals were

The incredible work of scientist Thomas Young has helped to favour and support the wave theory. Young’s work occurred almost a hundred years after Newton and Huygens proposed their theories on light. Young performed an experiment which strongly supported Huygens wave theory. Young obviously believed that light was made up or travelled in waves. Young reasoned that some type of interaction would occur when two light waves met. Young used a screen containing a single narrow slit to produce a light beam, in order to test this hypothesis. When the sun’s rays encounter the slit, they diffract to produce a single wave front. If this front is allowed to light a second screen having two closely spaced slits, two more sources of light are produced. Light shining from each slit travelling to a single point halfway between the two slits should arrive perfectly in step. The resulting waves should reinforce each other to produce a much larger