ABSTRACT
The wave theory of light of Huygens and the corpuscular theory of the light of Newton were the competing theories of these seventeenth century scientists, whose lives overlapped. Newton’s theory was dominant during the eighteenth century, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the interference experiments of Young, and somewhat later the work on diffraction by Fresnel and Arago, gave the wave theory a legitimacy and attention it did not have before.
