Light Essay

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What exactly is light? Is it a wave? Is it a particle? Is it a mythical being? This question has been debated on for many centuries. Some claimed it was a wave. Others claimed it was a particle. In the early nineteenth century, Isaac Newton proposed that light was made up of particles, but the answer was not agreed on until an experiment performed by Thomas Young. Young’s basic experiment consisted of a coherent light source such as a laser beam being shot through and illuminating a plate containing two parallel slits and being observed on a screen located behind the plate. What exactly were the results of this historical experiment?
Young’s experiment showed that light behaves with characteristics of both a particle and a wave. He observed that as the light source passed through the slits and was projected onto the screen, it diffracted and it produced an interference pattern, or a series of bright and dark lights on the screen. If light contained the characteristics of a classical particle, as some like Isaac Newton suggested, then the light would not have interfered when passing t...

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