Augustin-Jean Fresnel
(1788-1827)
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a physicist and civil engineer who saw the wave nature of light at a time when
Isaac Newton's corpuscular or particle theory was dominant.
Fresnel's research was so convincing that his transverse light wave completely replaced Newton's idea from the 1830's to the
wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century.
The idea that the light wave is transverse to the direction of travel explained the polarization of light. He
His best known optical device is likely the
Fresnel lens, which greatly reduces the mass and volume of glass needed to focus light, using a series of concentric rings of prisms at stepped angles. Fresnel also independently discovered and reinvented the standard glass lens of the previous century.
Fresnel found the transmission and reflective coefficients at the interface with different media. And he coined the terms linear polarization, circular polarization, and elliptical polarization, interpreting them as a difference in propagation speeds in different media.
Fresnel also observed the diffraction of light at a sharp edge at about the same time that
Joseph von Fraunhofer observed the pattern of interference fringes of light going though a thin slit comparable in size to the wavelength of light.
Newton's simple corpuscular model could not explain such diverse phenomena of light.
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