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The modern duality about the nature of light starts from Huygens - Newton duality about the nature of light, when Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton proposed competing theories of light: light was thought either to consist of waves (Huygens) or of particles (Newton).
Huygens and Newton
Newton was interested in light from very early on in his career, the work that first brought him to the attention of the scientific community was his experimental investigation of colour, and his invention of the ‘Newtonian’ reflecting telescope (published in 1672). However this work provided no theory of how light worked, and Newton made attempts at this for many years. For various reasons he favoured a particle theory of light – the explanation of light propagating in straight lines, except at interfaces, was then easily understood. Still, light particles were acted upon by an invisible aether.
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He gave the first theory of wave propagation, showing, among other things how they could be built up from ‘elementary wavelets’, radiated in circular patterns from multiple sources.
Compton
Although Max Planck and Albert Einstein postulated that light could behave as both a wave and a particle, it was Arthur Compton who finally proved that this was possible. His experiment involved scattering photons off electrons and offered proof for what we now refer to as the Compton effect.
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