Treatise on Light

For Ibn al-Haytham's Treatise on Light, see Ibn al-Haytham § Optical treatises.
Treatise on Light
AuthorChristiaan Huygens
LanguageFrench
GenreOptics
Published1690

Treatise on Light: In Which Are Explained the Causes of That Which Occurs in Reflection & Refraction (French: Traité de la Lumière: Où sont expliquées les causes de ce qui luy arrive dans la reflexion & dans la refraction) is a book written by Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens that was published in French in 1690. The book describes Huygens's conception of the nature of light propagation which makes it possible to explain the laws of geometrical optics shown in Descartes's Dioptrique, which Huygens aimed to replace.[1]

Unlike Newton's corpuscular theory, which was presented in the Opticks,[2] Huygens conceived of light as an irregular series of shock waves which proceeds with very great, but finite, velocity through the ether, similar to sound waves. Moreover, he proposed that each point of a wavefront is itself the origin of a secondary spherical wave, a principle known today as the Huygens–Fresnel principle.[3] The book is considered a pioneering work of theoretical and mathematical physics and the first mechanistic account of an unobservable physical phenomenon.[4][5]

  1. ^ A. I. Sabra (1981). Theories of Light, from Descartes to Newton. CUP Archive. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-521-28436-3.
  2. ^ Shapiro, A. E. (1989). "Huygens' 'Traité de la Lumière' and Newton's 'Opticks': Pursuing and Eschewing Hypotheses". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 43 (2): 223–247. doi:10.1098/rsnr.1989.0016. ISSN 0035-9149. JSTOR 531384. S2CID 145336637.
  3. ^ Bos, H. J. M. (1973). Huygens, Christiaan. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, pp. 597-613.
  4. ^ Dijksterhuis, Fokko Jan (2004). Lenses and Waves: Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematical Science of Optics in the Seventeenth Century. Archimedes. Springer Netherlands. ISBN 978-1-4020-2697-3.
  5. ^ Kubbinga, H (1995). "Christiaan Huygens and the foundations of optics". Pure and Applied Optics: Journal of the European Optical Society Part A. 4 (6): 723–739. Bibcode:1995PApOp...4..723K. doi:10.1088/0963-9659/4/6/004.