The Physics Book by DK

Author:DK
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DK Publishing
Published: 2020-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

The classic “double-slit” experiment, a modification of Thomas Young’s original, produces a pair of diffracting waves whose interference pattern generates light and dark stripes on a screen.

“The experiments I am about to relate … may be repeated with great ease, whenever the sun shines, and without any other apparatus than is at hand to every one.”

Thomas Young

Electromagnetic properties

Acceptance of light’s wavelike nature coincided with developing studies of electricity and magnetism. By the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell was able to describe light in a series of elegant equations as an electromagnetic disturbance moving at 186,282 miles (299,792 km) per second.

However, awkward questions still surrounded Huygens’ so-called “luminiferous ether” through which light supposedly traveled. Most experts believed that Maxwell’s equations described the speed at which light would enter the ether from a source. The failure of increasingly sophisticated experiments designed to detect this light-carrying medium raised fundamental questions and created a crisis that was only resolved by Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

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