The Concept of interference: Historiography and physics

Abstract

The debate on the nature of light began in antiquity and intensified in the second half of the seventeenth century. The major struggle was between the wave hypothesis and the emission (or corpuscular) hypothesis. Among the prominent scientists, Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) advocated the wave hypothesis, while Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was a champion of the emission hypothesis. Throughout the eighteenth century, the “emissionists” had the upper hand, and despite Leonhard Euler’s (1707–1783) efforts to reverse this trend, by 1800, the wave hypothesis was almost universally ignored.