Chemical Spectroscopy

Our current view of the nature of light started with the pioneering work of Newton, who in the seventeenth century showed that white light was a mixture of the rainbow colours, and these could be separated by, and combined back to white light, by a prism. Other landmarks in the field were experiments by Young to show the wave nature of light by diffraction and interference patterns. The work of Faraday, Maxwell, and others showed that visible light was part of an electromagnetic spectrum of radiation with a continuum of frequencies (or wavelengths). Later, Einstein argued that Planck’s interpretation of black-body radiation through the quantization of energy could only be accepted if light was also quantized; its basic component, the photon, was not divisible. This recovered aspects of the earlier corpuscular theory of light favored by Newton.