towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

enters the water, and makes the river look shallower than it
proves to be when we step into it. Even in Newton's time the
laws which governed these phenomena were well known. In the case
of reflection the angle at which the ray of light struck the
mirror was exactly the same as that at which it came off
after
reflection; in case of refraction, the sine of the angle of
incidence stood in a constant ratio to the sine of the angle
of
refraction.
HOP - Text number 10 - Physics
PARTICLES OR WAVES? tPzrt two)
Newton's corp'uscular theory met its doom in the fact
that when a ray of light falls on the surface of water,
only
part of it is refracted. The remainder is reflected, and it is
this latter part that produces the ordinary reflections of objects
in a lake, or the ripple of moonlight on the sea. It was
objected
that Newton's theory failed to account for this reflection, for
if light had consisted of corpuscles, the forces at the surface
of the water ought to have treated all the corpuscles alike;
when a corpuscle was refracted all ought to be, and this left
water with no power to reflect the sun, moon or stars.
Newton
tried to obviate this objection by attributing 'alternate fits of
transmission and reflection' to the surface of the water - the
corpuscle which fell on the surface at one instant was admitted,
but the next instant the gates were shut, and its companion was
turned away to form reflected light. This concept was strangely
and strikingly anticipatory of modern quantum theory in its
abandonment of the uniformity of nature and its replacement
of
determinism by probabilities, but i;t failed to carry
conviction
at the
time.