Sir Isaac Newton: Newton concluded that light is composed of coloured particles, which

combine to appear white. He introduced the term 'colour spectrum' and, although the spectrum
appears continuous, with no distinct boundaries between the colours, he chose to divide it into
seven: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Newton chose the number seven as
this reflected the Ancient Greek belief that it is a mystical number due to the fact that there are
seven 'wandering stars' and seven days in a week, a quarter of the time between two full Moons.

Chistiaan Huygens: Dutch physicist who was the leading proponent of the wave theory
of light. (1690), he developed the concept of the wavefront, but could not explain color. The
wave theory, however, was supported by the observation that two intersecting beams of light did
not bounce off each other as would be expected if they were composed of particles. In
contradiction to Newton, Huygens correctly believed that light must travel more slowly when it is
refracted towards the normal, although this was not proven until experiments by Foucault in the
nineteenth century.

Thomas Young: Young used his own design of optometer to measure refraction and
accommodation, and discovered his own astigmatism. He considered the different possible
origins of accommodation and confirmed that it was due to change in shape of the lens rather
than to change in shape of the cornea or an increase in axial length. However, the paper also
dealt with many other aspects of visual and ophthalmic optics, such as biometric parameters,
peripheral refraction, longitudinal chromatic aberration, depth-of-focus and instrument myopia.
These aspects of the paper have previously received little attention. We now give detailed
consideration to these and other less-familiar features of Young's work and conclude that his
studies remain relevant to many of the topics which currently engage visual scientists. Young
used the dimension of inches for distances and focal lengths. In the present work, while retaining
his Imperial values, we have converted these values to millimeters for distances and diopters for
lens powers and magnitudes of accommodation.

MAXWELL: Although the laws of electricity and of magnetism according to Gauss, Ampere, and
Faraday worked remarkably well, there was a glaring problem: taken together, these laws did not
"conserve charge". In other words, for these laws (as written) to work, one had to allow charge to
be created or destroyed. And this is not a good thing. (Additionally, from the form of the
equations of these theories, he noticed an interesting symmetry (a similarity) in the way the
electric field and the magenetic field appeared. It wasn't a perfect symmetry, however.)
Maxwell modified Ampere's Law by adding a single term to it. This was what was needed to make
the laws consistent with the conservation of charge. (It also made the above symmetry closer to
being a perfect symmetry.)
However, the addition of this term led to a remarkable prediction: the existence of
electromagnetic waves. With the full set of equations, Maxwell was able to calculate the speed of
these waves.He found that their speed was a constant, independent of the nature of the electric
and magnetic fields. What Maxwell found was that electromagnetic waves traveled at the speed
of light.Maxwell had just discovered a fundamental constant of nature: the speed of light. It just
"popped out" of the full set of equations.
Thus, the Maxwell equations not only unify the theories of electricity and of magnetism, but of
optics as well. In other words, electricity, magnetism, and light could all be understood as
aspects of a single object: the electromagnetic field. Quite a remarkable achievement!
As a consequence, the Maxwell equations made the physical prediction that "light travels with
the same speed, in all directions". In other words, "a spherical pulse of light will appear
spherical".

HERTZ: , if electromagnetic waves were spreading from the oscillator sparks, they would induce
a current in the loop that would send sparks across the gap. This occurred when Hertz turned on
the oscillator, producing the first transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves. Hertz
also noted that electrical conductors reflect the waves and that they can be focused by concave
reflectors. He found that nonconductors allow most of the waves to pass through. Another of his
discoveries was the photoelectric effect.

Planck: Quantum mechanics (QM; also known as quantum physics, or quantum theory) is a
fundamental branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at nanoscopic scales,
where the action is on the order of the Planck constant. It departs from classical
mechanicsprimarily at the quantum realm of atomic and subatomic length scales. Quantum
mechanics provides a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-
like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. Quantum mechanics provides a
substantially useful framework for many features of the modern periodic table of elements,
including the behavior of atoms during chemical bonding, and has played a significant role in the
development of many modern technologies.

Einstein: His radical insight into the nature of light would help transform Einstein from an
unknown patent clerk to the genius at the center of 20th-century physics.
Scientists call 1905 Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis his year of miracles. Within a few months,
Einstein wrote a series of papers that would transform the way we see the universe. They
included his theory of special relativity and the famous equation E=mc.
The first paper described his particle theory of light, which became one of the foundations of
modern physics. Just as popular legend has it

Compton: Compton observed the scattering of X-rays from electrons in a carbon target and
found that the scattered X-rays had a longer wavelength than those incident upon the target.
The shift of the wavelength increased with scattering angle. Compton explained and modeled the
data by assuming a particle (photon) nature for light and applying conservation of energy and
conservation of momentum to the collision between the photon and the electron. The scattered
photon has lower energy and therefore a longer wavelength according to the relationship
between energy and wavelength discovered in 1900 by German physicist Max Planck.
The Compton effect is defined as the decrease in energy (increase in wavelength) of an X-ray or
gamma ray photon, when it interacts with matter. This effect demonstrates that light cannot be
explained purely as a wave phenomenon. Compton's work provided convincing proof that in
scattering experiments, light behaves as a stream of particles whose energy is proportional to
the frequency (i.e. inversely proportional to the wavelength). As a result of the interaction, the
electron is given part of the energy and a photon containing the remaining energy is emitted in a
different direction from the original, so that the overall momentum of the system is conserved.

Broglie: In 1924 a young physicist, de Broglie, speculated that nature did not single out light as
being the only matter which exhibits a wave-particle duality. He proposed that ordinary
``particles'' such as electrons, protons, or bowling balls could also exhibit wave characteristics in
certain circumstances. Quantitatively, he associated a wavelength to a particle of
mass m moving at speed v :

(10)

= .
Since the momentum of such a particle is p = mv , mathematically this relation is equivalent to
Eq.(27.8) for the momentum of a photon in Compton scattering. However, we should emphasize
that these two equations have a very different physical content.
Tests of this hypothesis would involve demonstrating wave properties of matter at the
wavelength given by Eq.(27.10). Relatively straightforward tests are offered by diffraction and
interference - if a beam of such ``particles'' were shone at a diffraction grating and a diffraction
pattern of a series of light and dark fringes results, then one would be forced to adopt the wave
picture for this phenomena. We recall that for a good diffraction pattern to result the size of the
diffraction slits should be of the same order as the wavelength of the light used. As we shall see
in some examples later, for macroscopic objects such as bowling balls this would require sizes of
slits of the order of 10- 34 m or so, which is much outside present-day technology. However, for
electrons the sizes of slits required are of the order of 10- 11 m or so, which are readily available.
Thus, it is possible to verify the wave nature of electrons in such diffraction experiments, and
indeed this property is the principle behind the relatively common electron microscope.
Therefore, Nature seems to be symmetric, in that light and ordinary ``particles'' exhibits this
wave-particle duality.