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Nov 11, 2023 · While it was thought that the bar of rainbow colors — called a spectrum — produced when white light (like sunlight) travels through a glass prism is caused by some property of the prism that...
In optics, the corpuscular theory of light states that light is made up of small discrete particles called "corpuscles" (little particles) which travel in a straight line with a finite velocity and possess impetus. This was based on an alternate description of atomism of the time period.
Newton proposed that light consists of little masses. This means that a horizontal beam of light near the earth is undergoing projectile motion, and forms a parabola. The straight line we observe is due to the fact that the speed of the particles is so great. In one microsecond, light travels 300 m.
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In the 1660s, English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton began a series of experiments with sunlight and prisms. He demonstrated that clear white light was composed of seven visible colors.
The most prominent advocate of a particle theory of light was Isaac Newton. Newton’s careful investigations into the properties of light in the 1660s led to his discovery that white light consists of a mixture of colours.
Thomas Young’s double-slit diffraction experiment provided clear evidence against Newton’s theory of light. Instead of producing two vertical bright bands right behind the slits, Young observed multiple bright spots spanning a large area than the distance between the slits.
…the phenomena of light, the corpuscular and hence atomic theory of Newton, which held that light is made of tiny particles, was adopted almost universally, in spite of Huygens’s brilliant development of the wave hypothesis.
