The nature of light has long been a matter for speculation. As long ago as the late 1660s Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light from the Sun could be separated into colours with the aid of a prism. He further showed that the colours could be recombined to form white light again.
Newton used this experiment as evidence to support his corpuscular theory — that light consisted of particles. Not everyone agreed with him. In particular, his contemporaries Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens favoured a wave model of light but, since they had no evidence to back up their claim, Newton’s particle model remained the favoured one until the early years of the nineteenth century.
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