ABSTRACT
Light, as we learned in Chapter 14, propagates through space as an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell’s third equation tells us that a changing magnetic eld produces a changing electric eld which, according to Maxwell’s fourth equation, creates in turn a changing magnetic eld. As Maxwell was able to show, once the process starts, the changing magnetic and electric elds continue to propagate as a wave. Although we also learned in Chapter 7 that light also behaves as a particle, the wave theory of light is adequate for many purposes. We shall occupy ourselves with the study of the wave nature of light in the next chapter. Here, we turn to two phenomena that do not depend on whether we think of light as particles or as waves and are the basis for many optical effects; the laws of reflection and refraction.
