Treatise on Light
by Christiaan Huygens · Traité de la lumière
Assigned by 2 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1690
- Language
- French
- Length
- Medium · 128 pp120 to 300 pages
- Difficulty
- Difficult4 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendTreatise on Light, translated by Silvanus P. ThompsonDover, 1962The only translation in print, and short enough to read in an evening with a pencil.
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Huygens argues that light is not a stream of particles but a disturbance spreading through an all-pervading ether, like sound through air. Each point that the disturbance reaches becomes the centre of a new spherical wavelet, and the common tangent of those wavelets is the advancing wavefront: the construction now called Huygens's principle. From it he derives the laws of reflection and refraction, explains why light bends toward the normal in a denser medium by travelling more slowly there, and accounts in detail for the double refraction of Iceland crystal, which had baffled everyone.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Treatise on Light are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
