Abstract
Christiaan Huygens began his famous Treatise on Light by reminding the reader of the peculiar properties exhibited by rays of light. They travel in straight lines, obey the law of reflection when striking a mirror, bend when traveling from one medium to another, travel at an extraordinary speed, and are able to pass through one another unhindered. Huygens then suggested that these properties of light might be explained by a wave theory, analogous to the well-established wave theory of sound. But if sound requires a medium such as air, then what type of medium does the propagation of light necessitate? And how can a wave theory of light explain the typically rectilinear (i.e. straight-line) motion of light rays when passing through apertures and past obstructions? These are the types of questions which Huygens must now address.
Each little region of a luminous body, such as the Sun, a candle, or a burning coal, generates its own waves of which that region is the centre.
—Christiaan Huygens
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Notes
- 1.
Strictly speaking, the wave-fronts are spherical only if the vibrating body is itself spherically symmetric.
- 2.
More generally, the superposition principle finds application in any system which is governed by a linear wave equation, such as classical electrodynamics in a vacuum, and Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics.
- 3.
See Ex. 14.1, above.
- 4.
This angular position corresponds to the point, \(C\), separating light from shadow in Fig. 14.4 of Huygens’ text. Strictly speaking, the region of shadow is neither perfectly dark nor marked by complete destructive interference of light. When light passes through a narrow gap, such as the slit between two facing knife blades, there appear thin (often barely visible) alternating fringes of light and dark within the region of shadow. This was observed by Young, Grimaldi and Newton; see Young’s discussion of interference in Chap. 20 of the present volume.
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Kuehn, K. (2016). Huygens’ Principle. In: A Student's Guide Through the Great Physics Texts. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21816-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21816-8_14
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