Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 101

Newton also performed extensive work in understanding the properties of light, a field known as optics. Newton supported a view that light moves as tiny particles, as opposed to a theory that light travels as a wave. He performed all his work in optics assuming that light moves as tiny balls of energy flying through the air.

For nearly a century, Newton’s view of light as particles dominated, until Thomas Young’s experiments in the early 1800s demonstrated that light exhibits the properties of waves — namely, the principle of superposition (see the earlier “Catching the wave” section for more on superposition and the later “Light as a wave: The ether theory” section for more on light waves).

The understanding of light, which began with Newton, would lead to the revolutions in physics by Albert Einstein and, ultimately, to the ideas at the heart of string theory. In string theory, both gravity and light are caused by the behavior of strings.