Light as a Wave Discipline: EducationChristian Huygens, who was a contemporary of Isaac Newton, suggested that light travels in waves. Isaac Newton, however, thought that light was compsed of particles that were too small to detect individually. In 1801 a physicist in England, Thomas Young, performed an experiment that showed that light behaves as a wave. He passed a beam of light through two thin, parallel slits. Alternating bright and dark bands appeared on a white screen some distance from the slit.Tags: wavelengthinterference
Spectroscopy Discipline: Education Spectra Spectroscopy uses the principle first suggested by Isaac Newton, that white light is a combination of many different colors of light, and a prism can be used to separate white light into a rainbow called aTags: spectrawavelength
Magnitude and Color Discipline: Education In practice, the magnitude of a celestial object is measured in certain wavelengths or colors using filters. This is because information about the color of stars is very useful to astronomers and gives them information about the surface temperature of a star.Tags: color indexwavelengthcolorsurface temperature
