de circuli magnitudine inventa explanation

#DE CIRCULI MAGNITUDINE INVENTA EXPLANATION SERIES#

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. 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. 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 originally worked on light rays and the properties of lenses and their configurations in his work Dioptrica, which began in 1652 but remained unpublished. The book is considered a pioneering work of theoretical and mathematical physics and the first mechanistic account of an unobservable physical phenomenon. 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.

#DE CIRCULI MAGNITUDINE INVENTA EXPLANATION SERIES#

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 ether, similar to sound waves.

The book describes Huygens' conception of the nature of light propagation which makes it possible to explain the laws of geometrical optics shown in Descartes' Dioptrique, which Huygens aimed to replace. 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. For Ibn al-Haytham's Treatise on Light, see Ibn al-Haytham § Optical treatises.

De circuli magnitudine inventa explanation