Abstract
The most impressive evidence of the wave nature of light is given by the bright and dark bands that, under appropriate conditions, are formed in the overlapping zone of two or more beams of light, and which become observable, for example, by interposing a diffuser screen in such a zone. These bands are called interference fringes, and the phenomenon itself is known as interference. Historically, the first documented observations of interference fringes were made independently by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who noted the colored fringes produced by thin films. Hooke, in particular, made a systematic study of them and observed the ones that are improperly called “Newton’s rings”. Newton himself realized the periodic nature of Hooke’s rings, but he gave an explanation of compromise between wave ideas and his corpuscular theory of light that was completely wrong.
The law is, that “wherever two portion of the same light arrive at the eye by different routes, either exactly or very nearly in the same direction, the light becomes most intense when the difference of the routes is any multiple of a certain length, and least intense in the intermediate state of the interfering portions; and this length is different for light of different color”.
Thomas Young [Young 1802, p. 387]
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Giusfredi, G. (2019). Interference. In: Physical Optics. UNITEXT for Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25279-3_3
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