ABSTRACT
Over the past two millennia there have been many theories purporting to explain the nature of light. Most have eventually been discarded because they could not provide a fully satisfactory explanation of its behavior. Modern philosophers of science assert that the concept of a theory of light (or, indeed, of any physical phenomenon) is logically unsound, and that it makes more sense to consider the ‘theories’ as models that represent the behavior of light under certain circumstances. These models can then be used within their limits to make useful predictions. It is, of course, good sense to choose the simplest useful model for a given investigation. For most of this book I have therefore chosen the comparatively simple Huyghens wave model. This represents light as transverse waves.
