Since the dawn of man, light has been a point of interest. For centuries man has studied light and its effects in the world, and for a long time we were oblivious to how it truly worked; but thanks to a young scientist, name Thomas Young, we learned how it worked in the early nineteenth century. Light, as it turned out to be, is a wave particle rippling through the universe. The purpose of this essay is to explain Young’s findings and the experiment he used to learn how light worked.
During the centuries prior to Young’s momentous discovery, scientists heavily debated lights properties. Through experimentation and observation, brilliant scientists such as Robert Hooke and Leonhard Euler proposed a wave theory of light; that it rippled outwards in all directions. However, Isaac Newton one of the most prolific minds of the time rejected such thinking, believing rather - that light worked the same way as particles. By the time Thomas Young came into place people generally believed in Newton’s thoughts of particle waves. So when Young presented a paper to the Royal Society, explaining his idea that light had wave-like motions, he was scoffed at and rejected. Like every great scientist though he relentlessly continued his research until he performed his famous experiment, proving that light did in fact move in a wave.
After spending years working to prove his theory, Young created the double slit experiment to provide more substantial proof to his claim. His goal with this experiment was to prove how light really worked, which he believed, moved in a wave-like pattern. To begin the experiment a source of light must be placed directly in front of a barrier that contains two parallel lines. Past the slitted barrier would be a wall for ...
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...of the slits the pattern came out to be what you would expect from particles. Albert Einstein once said “It seems as though we must use sometimes the one theory and sometimes the other, while at times we may use either. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty. We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do”. This bizzare phenomenon baffles scientists yet it has been excepted as a fundamental part of quantum mechanics.
Throughout this report we have discuessed how Thomas Young proved that light has a wave-like motion. We have also discusses how the double slit experiment proved that light was a wave by allowing people to see the pattern made when light traveled through two slits. We also briefly discussed how elementary particles are thought to act as both waves and particles.
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Masters, Barry R. "Albert Einstein and the Nature of Light." 2010. Optics and Photonics News. The Optical Society. Article. 31 March 2014. .
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