70 Year Magazine Archive

Of Light

by Wm. F. Rickenbacker

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In 1704 Isaac Newton published his Opticks, addressed to “Readers of quick Wit and Understanding.” He concludes his text with a series of questions for further study. All the world knows his “Query I,” which beat Einstein to the punch by more than two hundred years: “Do not bodies act upon light at a distance, and by their action bend its rays, and is not this action strongest at the least distance?”

He was pointing his finger at something that had not yet been named: the quantum theory of light. But everyone knew that light behaved, also, as sheer energy: the wave theory.

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