Fresnel as Seen by Chemists: Circular Birefringence in Optically-Active Media
نویسنده
چکیده
Augustin Fresnel, who was born in Broglie (Eure, northern France) in 1788 and died in Ville-d’Avray (currently in the Hauts-de-Seine department) in 1827, began his education at the Ecole polytechnique in Paris at the age of 16. Five years later, he became a member of the Corps des ponts et chaussées [Corps of Bridges]. Unanimously elected as a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1823, he accomplished in his short life first-class work on the study of light, highlighting its wave-like nature and opposing the corpuscular theory strongly defended by Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and, among others, Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862) and Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781-1840). Like the work of Thomas Young (17731829), Fresnel carried out experiments on the diffraction of light, which could only be explained by the wave theory. He subsequently managed to apply his theory to polarisation and formulated it mathematically.
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