The Most Famous Failed Experiment
6 min readAug 31, 2021
One of the most intriguing scientific stories of the nineteenth century is the development of our knowledge about light. Newton had proposed in 1675 that light consists of single, infinitesimally small particles, which he called corpuscles, from the Latin corpus (body). These particles were thought to be emitted in all directions from a specific source. The particle theory was able to explain some optical phenomena by assuming…