The Importance Of Young's Double-Slit Experiment

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This report serves to state the findings that arose from investigating Young’s double-slit experiment. One point that the reader should look forward to is an explanation of the interference effect. It is also interesting to note the importance of Young’s work in relation to the development of light-wave theory.
Throughout history, philosophers and scientists have debated whether light acts as a particle or a wave. In the seventeenth century, Dutchman Christiaan Huygens’ optic research insinuated that light was wave-like. This motion is akin to the ripples seen atop a body of water once an object is dropped in. In Treatise on Light (1690), Huygens’ Principle explains that wavefronts are distributed so that the extent of the wavelets lie between the geometric parameters drawn from its light source. Meanwhile in England, Isaac Newton had been conducting his prism experiments to further understand light and color. Newton’s corpuscular theory approaches the nature of light as a stream of particles. Because of Newton’s influence, particle theory was widely accepted by the scientific community. Nearly a century later, Thomas Young, an English physician and physicist, was intrigued by light’s dilation after it had passed through a thin slit. He then set out to discover the mysterious properties behind light.
While Newton’s observations were sufficient enough for a macroscopic environment, they did not correctly anticipate the results on a much smaller scale. Young challenged the standard particle theory in the early nineteenth century. Young understood that sound traveled in waves. He recalled that when two sound waves interfered under the right conditions, they canceled out. The Englishman then hypothesized that this interference effect ...

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...as a wave, it would act as a wave. But, when the light was measured as a particle, the wave property of interference ceased. This was coined the observer effect. A French scientist Louis-Victor de Broglie defined light as both a particle and a wave. Even with recent experiments, such as Feynman’s controlled double-slit electron diffraction, there still remains much more to learn about the characteristics of light.
From researching Young’s double slit experiments, one can learn about the complexities of light. The interference effect, for example, indicates wave-like motion. Furthermore, wave theory’s historical background played a role in Young’s hypothesis formulation. Similarly, the results of the experiment impacted the unfolding of modern wave theory. In short, the double slit experiment is evidence that light can display both particle and wave-like qualities.

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