Treatise on Light

Treatise on Light: In Which Are Explained the Causes of That Which Occurs in Reflection & Refraction (: 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. Unlike Newton's corpuscular theory, which was presented in the Opticks, Huygens conceived of light as an irregular series of shock waves which proceeds with very great, but finite, velocity through the aether, 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. The book is considered a pioneering work of theoretical and mathematical physics and the first mechanistic account of an unobservable physical phenomenon. Overview Huygens worked on the mathematics of light rays and the properties of refraction in his work Dioptrica, which began in 1652 but remained unpublished, and which predated his lens grinding work. In 1672, the problem of the strange refraction of the Iceland crystal created a puzzle regarding the physics of refraction that Huygens wanted to solve. Huygens eventually was able to solve this problem by means of elliptical waves in 1677 and confirmed his theory by experiments mostly after critical reactions in 1679. His explanation of birefringence was based on three hypotheses: (1) There are inside the crystal two media in which light waves proceed, (2) one medium behaves as ordinary ether and carries the normally refracted ray, and (3) the velocity of the waves in the other medium is dependent on direction, so that the waves do not expand in spherical form, but rather as ellipsoids of revolution; this second medium carries the abnormally refracted ray. By studying the symmetry of the crystal, Huygens was able to determine the direction of the axis of the ellipsoids, and from the refraction properties of the abnormal ray he established the proportion between the axes. He calculated the refraction of rays on plane sections of the crystal other than the natural crystal sides, and ultimately verified all his results experimentally.