Young’s Law

Before we look at Young’s Law we must first ask ourselves, what is light? For
centuries, the greatest minds in science debated this issue. In the late 1600s,
Isaac Newton proposed that light was a stream of particles. But at the same
time, a Dutch physicist named Christiaan Huygens proposed that light was a
wave. And this debate raged on until it was settle by the experiment created by
Thomas Young, known as the Double Split Experiment.
Newton’s proposal of light being a particle was later debunked by Thomas
Young one hundred and twenty-nine years later with the famous “double slit
experiment”.
When performing the double split experiment it was noted, that if light was a
particle you would expect it to go through each split and produce a bright spot
underneath, so in the end we would see two bright spots under the bottom of the
box.
But, if light was behaving as wave, then one slit can interact with the waves
from the other slit.
An example of how the double split experiment would be similar to the ripples
in a pond. Imagine having two sources of ripple, which are basically like the
two slits, when I create ripples with a single source, they travel out with circular
wave front, which is the norm. But if I add a second source of ripples, then we
start getting an interesting pattern. This pattern is created by the ripples from the
two sources interacting with each other. Where they meet up peaks with peaks
and troughs with troughs, the amplitude of the wave is increased, that’s what we
call constructive interference. But if the peak from one wave meets up with
trough from the other, then we get destructive interference and there’s basically
no wave there. And this is exactly what was happening with the light. When the
light from one slit met up peaks with peaks and troughs with troughs, they
constructively interfered and produced a bright spot. But if the trough from the
wave from one slit met up with the peak of the wave from the other slit, they
would destructively interfere, and you wouldn’t see any light there. It would be
light cancelling itself out. Now there is a slight complication, which is that the
sunlight is composed of many different colors, and they have different
wavelengths. So, obviously, there going to meet up at slightly different points,
and that’s what caused the rainbowing effects as we go further from the central
maximum. So the reason for all the beautiful colors you see is because for each
different color, you have a different wavelength.
Wave Theory – Young
Young showed experimentally in 1802 that light from two very narrow slits can
produce a pattern of bright and dark fringes on a screen. He argued that this was
the result of the ‘principle of superposition’ of light acting as waves. However,
Newton’s corpuscular theory still lived on, mainly due to his reputation as a
dominant physicist and mathematics.