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Cartesian Lumière And Newtonian Light, Brian Canfield

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

My thesis examines the scientific methods of René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton. I begin by looking briefly at Aristotle's concept of light. Aristotle believed that light was a property that the medium acquired instantaneously from a luminous source. Descartes later separated light from the medium and the luminous object as in instantaneous pression in the ether. He introduced a more mechanical way of examining light with this separation. Descartes' methods consist mainly of analogies between the behavior of light and observations of processes unrelated to optics. Descartes appears to have derived the law of refraction. This law is a …