ABSTRACT
Newton and Huygens hold conflicting views New ideas started to emerge during the seventeenth century. Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) thought that light travelled in waves. He believed light crossed space through the mysterious medium of ether – a weightless, invisible substance existing in space and the Earth’s atmosphere. Huygens’ contemporary Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) conducted a series of investigations into the nature of light and colour, which indicated that light travelled as particles. Newton was not wholly convinced that this was the complete picture but he was so influential that his ‘corpuscular’ theory took precedence. In his 1704 book Opticks Newton says: ‘Light is never known to follow crooked passages nor to bend into the shadow’. Light as particles must always travel in straight lines.
