Swans on Tea

Particle and wave descriptions of light, duking it out in the early 19th century. What a drag: Arago’s Experiment (1810) over at Skulls in the Stars.

Before 1800, most scientists were proponents of the so-called corpuscular theory of light propagation. In this view, which was championed and solidified by Isaac Newton in his 1704 book Opticks, held that light consisted of a stream of particles. Newton explicitly argued against the wave theory of light and (seemingly) refuted arguments by early wave theory proponents such as Christiaan Huygens. Newton’s arguments, and his personal gravitas, left his particle theory mostly unchallenged until the early 1800s.