Wonders of the Universe

YOUNG’S DOUBLE-SLIT EXPERIMENT

By the end of the seventeenth century, two competing theories for light had emerged – both of which are correct. On one side was Sir Isaac Newton, who believed that light was composed of particles – or ‘corpuscles’, as he called them in his Hypothesis of Light, published in 1675. On the other were Newton’s great scientific adversary, Robert Hooke, and the Dutch physicist and astronomer, Christiaan Huygens. The particle/wave debate rumbled on until the turn of the nineteenth century, with most physicists siding with Newton. There were some notable exceptions, including the great mathematician Leonhard Euler, who felt that the phenomena of diffraction could only be explained by a wave theory. In 1801, the English doctor Thomas Young appeared to settle the matter once and for all when he reported the results from his famous double-slit experiment, which clearly showed that light diffracted, and therefore must travel in the form of a wave.

Diffraction is a fascinating and beautiful phenomena that is very difficult to explain without waves. If you shine light onto a screen through a barrier with a very thin slit cut into it, you don’t see a bright light on the screen opposite the slit, but instead you see a complex but regular pattern of light and dark areas.

The explanation for this is that when you mix lots of waves together they don’t only have to add up. Imagine two waves on top of each other with exactly the same wavelength and wave height (technically known as the amplitude), but aligned precisely so that the peak of one wave lies directly on the trough of the other (in more technical language, we say that the waves are 180 degrees out of phase), and so the waves cancel each other out. If these waves were light waves you would get darkness! This is exactly what is seen in diffraction experiments through small slits. The slits act like lots of little sources of light, all slightly displaced from one another. This means that there will be places beyond the slits where the waves cancel each other out, and places where they will add up, leading to the light and dark areas seen by experimenters like Young. This was taken as clear evidence that light was some kind of wave – but waves of what?

The results of Young’s double-slit experiment are revealed in this detailed, wide pattern. The experiment demonstrates the inseparability of the wave and particle natures of light and other quantum particles.

GIPHOTOSTOCK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

The movement of waves across the ocean can be explained by a set of equations; Maxwell discovered a similar form of equation explained waves within magnetic fields.