ABSTRACT
The Greek philosophers of antiquity speculated about the nature of light, and they were familiar with the rectilinear propagation of light, and the reflection and refraction phenomena of light rays at an interface. The law of reflection was known to the Greeks, but the law of refraction was discovered experimentally only in 1621 by Snell [38]. Shortly afterward Descartes derived the laws of reflection and refraction by comparison with the trajectory of a ball [59, 177]. The observations of the rectilinear propagation of light made it plausible for Newton and others to consider a light ray as a stream of particles [177, 169]. Although Newton devoted himself to the development of the corpuscular model of light, his views on the nature of light were as ambivalent as that nature itself, as emphasized by Nussenzveig [177]. The first observations of interference, and the detection of the presence of light in the geometrical shadow of a material body (diffraction) [87] made it more likely that light was a wave phenomenon, a view first advocated by Hooke, [99] and much later by Young, who formulated the basic principle of interference [255]. The earliest known example of frustrated total reflection is due to Newton [170] who observed the phenomenon now known as Newton’s rings [38]. Although the visual appearance of the rings suggests that light is a wave phenomenon, Newton invoked his corpuscular light theory [177] to model total reflection.
