Christiaan huygens light theory rm

Book by Christiaan Huygens

For Ibn al-Haytham's Treatise on Light, see Ibn al-Haytham § Optical treatises.

Treatise on Light: In Which Are Explained the Causes of That Which Occurs in Reflection & Refraction (French: Traité de la Lumière: Où sont expliquées les causes de ce qui luy arrive dans la reflexion & dans la refraction) is a book written by Dutch polymathChristiaan Huygens that was published in French in 1690.

The book describes Huygens's conception of the nature of light propagation which makes it possible to explain the laws of geometrical optics shown in Descartes'sDioptrique, which Huygens aimed to replace.^[1]

Unlike Newton's corpuscular theory, which was presented in the Opticks,^[2] Huygens conceived of light as an irregular series of shock waves which proceeds with very great, but finite, velocity through the ether, similar to sound waves.

Moreover, he proposed that each point of a wavefront is itse