Strangely enough, Plato and Aristotle regarded light as a property of
the eye and the eye alone. Out of the eye tentacles were shot which
intercepted the object and so illuminated it. From what has already
been said, such a view seems highly unlikely. Far more consistent with
their philosophy in other directions would have been the theory that
light has its source in the object and not in the eye, and travels
from object to eye rather than the reverse. How little substance the
Aristotelian contribution possesses is immediately seen when we refer
to the art of photography. Here light rays produce effects which are
independent of any property of the eye. The blind man may click the
camera and produce the impression on the plate.
Newton, of course, could have fallen into no such error as did Plato
and Aristotle. The source of light to him was the luminous body. Such
a body had the power of emitting minute particles at great speed,
and these when coming in contact with the retina produce the sensation
of sight.
This emission or corpuscular theory of Newton's was combated
very strongly by his illustrious Dutch contemporary, Huyghens, who
maintained that light was a wave phenomenon, the disturbance starting
at the luminous body and spreading out in all directions. The wave
motions of the sea offer a certain analogy.
Newton's strongest objection to Huyghens' wave theory was that it
seemed to offer no satisfactory explanation as to why light travelled
in straight lines. He says: "To me the fundamental supposition itself
seems impossible, namely that the waves or vibrations of any fluid can,
like the rays of light, be propagated in straight lines, without a
continual and very extravagant bending and spreading every way into
the quiescent medium, where they are terminated by it. I mistake if
there be not both experiment and demonstration to the contrary."
In the corpuscular theory the particles emitted by the luminous
body were supposed to travel in straight lines. In empty space the
particles travelled in straight lines and spread in all directions. To
explain how light could traverse some types of matter--liquids, for
example--Newton supposed that these light particles travelled in the
spaces between the molecules of the liquid.
Newton's objection to the wave theory was not answered very
convincingly by Huyghens. Today we know that light waves of high
frequency tend to travel in straight lines, but may be prevented from
doing so by gravitational forces of bodies near its path. But this
is Einstein's discovery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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