Old Problems in a New Perspective - Newton's Corpuscles, Maxwell's Waves and Einstein's Quanta

The theme of the lecture is to look at the way LIGHT has been perceived by the three great men of Science and connection between their theories as perceived by the speaker.

Newton viewed light rays as a moving stream of tiny corpuscles and explained the laws of reflection and refraction. However, the prediction of his corpuscular model of greater velocity of light in a denser medium was not found to be in agreement with experiment. Although Fermat using the principle of least optical path resolved this issue, the Corpuscular theory failed to explain the phenomena of interference and diffraction. The wave theory of Huygens & Maxwell was found adequate for this.

The physics community at this point of time, long before the advent of quantum mechanics, was confronted with the wave-corpuscle duality of light. This duality has, in recent time, been resolved through the mechanism of WAVIZATION which allows one to pass on to Maxwell equations from Newtonian dynamics of corpucles.

Some experimental consequences of Maxwell's theory, passage from this theory to quantum theory initiated by Einstein, recent debate about its correctness, quantum nature of light, elementarity of photon etc. will be discussed at length in the lecture without getting into mathematical details.