How Do Famous Physicists and Their Work and Experiment on Light Influence Our World Now?

How Do Famous Physicists and Their Work and Experiment on Light Influence Our World Now?

The world we live in now is packed by science knowledge. Their applications are literally everywhere and one matter we use for centuries now is light. The knowledge on light we are practicing is the outcome of generations after generations of scientists and physicists. Yet, how important their findings actually are? In this essay, I am going to investigate how do famous physicists and their work and experiment on light influence our world by analyzing Young and his two-slit experiment.

Young's two-slit experiment established Huygens' wave theory on light. Huygens suggested that light behaves and travels as a wave and was published in the 17th century but not been proven. Unfortunately, around the same time, Newton published his Corpuscular Theory of light and was spread very wildly partly due his reputation. It became the main stream explanation for the behavior of light through the 17th and 18th century. It was until Young practiced his experiment in the early 1800s that brought Huygens' theory back to the argument and vanquishing Newton's Corpuscular Theory.

Young experiment visualized the behavior of light. He first let a large beam of light travel through small slit into a dark room. Then, at some distance away the first slit, he place another two small slit that are alone each other in front of the beam of light that just traveled through the first small slit. , According to Newton's theory and light consist particles than the separated would expect to see the split light be parallel and the sum of their quantity would be same as the original. But actually, the light traveled through the slit became much wider as it travels further. Also a fringe of alternating colors was shown on the observation screen. This was caused by the interference between the two beams of lights. All of these behaviors were exactly the same as how wavefronts would behave under the same condition; diffracted and interfaces once they meet. Young proved that light was wave since only Huygens' theory could explain this phenomenon.

After Young, there were a few more physicists practiced experiments that helped established Huygens wave theory. Nevertheless, it was Young who started this. For example, the first experiment based on Young's Two-slit experiment was elaborated by Augustin-Jean Fresnel and François Arago a few years after. Their experiment was on the ‘ the effect of polarization on the interference of light' which supports Huygens' wave theory even further. The question they asked was ‘what the result would be if a similar interference experiment was done where the light coming from the two pinholes was orthogonally polarized' and it was obviously inspired by Young since they began their experiment by reexamine Young's