PHILOSOPHICAL AND PHYSICAL REVISION OF THE DUALISM OF LIGHT
Valentin Ignatievich Litvintsev
Institute of Automation and Electrometry, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia
Keywords: corpuscles, photon, wave theory, reflection, refraction, diffraction, interference, moving media
Abstract
The paper examines the opposition between Newton’s corpuscular theory of light and Huygens’ wave theory that arose in the mid-seventeenth century. From the height of modern knowledge, based on the concept of a light beam as a stream of photon corpuscles and using well-known laws of mechanics, basic phenomena are explained and important optical formulas are derived. This speaks in favor of the corpuscular theory as a physical model of light. The wave theory plays an additional role - it is an averaged mathematical tool of optics that serves as an abstrаct (conditional) model.
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