Article ID: CBB001320381

Thomas Young's Musical Optics: Translating Sound into Light (2013)

unapi

Thomas Young's interest in music affected his scientific work throughout his career. His 1800--1803 papers interrelate musical, acoustic, and optical topics to translate the wave theory from sound to light, as does his synoptic Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1807) in justifying his discoveries to a larger audience. Returning to optics in 1817, in the aftermath of the work of Fresnel, Young grounded in musico-acoustical studies his suggestion that light may be a transverse (rather than longitudinal) wave, along with its paradoxical implications for the ether, which he discussed in 1823. Young's decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs also rested on phonology.

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Authors & Contributors
Darrigol, Olivier
Chen, Xiang
Worrall, John
Pesic, Peter
Moura, Breno Arsioli
Morton, N.
Concepts
Optics
Light
Physics
Acoustics
Natural philosophy
Mathematics
Time Periods
19th century
17th century
18th century
Early modern
Renaissance
Medieval
Places
England
United States
Netherlands
Germany
Europe
British Isles
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