ABSTRACT
On the Nature of Light and Matter In the first years of the nineteenth century, Thomas Young (1773-1829)1 demonstrated and reported several classical optical interference phænomena, thereby giving rebirth to the wave or undulatory theory of light that had been advocated much earlier-especially by Christian Huygens (1629-95), Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Leonard Euler (170783). Although the name of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is now universally associated with the opposing corpuscular or emission nature of light, Young maintained that his own conceptions had their origin in Newton’s researches.
