Chemistry and Physics | Is Light Made Of Waves Or Particles?
Is light made of waves or particles?
This question was the subject of a centuries-long debate. Most seventeenth-century European scientists, including Englishman Isaac Newton (1642-1727), believed that light was composed of particles. Newton took a prism and split white light into its constituent colors (colors that make up white light; they include red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). He concluded that white light was a combination of particles of colored light, which would come together in a vacuum.
Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), however, believed that a group of particles would not likely assemble independently in a vacuum. He proposed, instead, that light was made up of waves, similar to sound waves, that traveled through an invisible substance called "ether." In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Polish-born American physicist (a scientist specializing in the interaction between...
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