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Published December 8, 2011 | public
Book Section - Chapter

Cauchy's Theory of Dispersion Anticipated by Fresnel

Abstract

In 1836 Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857), having left Paris and settled in Prague following the July Revolution, published a memoir on the dispersion of light under the auspices of Prague's Royal Society of Sciences. In it he produced an equation that is even today known as Cauchy's formula for dispersion. It works reasonably well for normally dispersive bodies and was only replaced towards the end of the 19th century following the discovery of anomalous dispersion in Denmark by C. Christiansen in 1870 and consequent changes in theory by Wolfgang Sellmeier and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) in Germany. In his publication Cauchy nowhere referred for inspiration to Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), the originator in France of wave optics. Instead, he wrote that Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis (1792–1843), having read Cauchy's earlier work on the equations of motion that govern a system of material points, suggested that terms which Cauchy had there neglected might account for dispersion – assuming that the medium, or ether, that was presumed to carry optical radiation is itself so constituted.

Additional Information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. First Online: 08 December 2011.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
March 1, 2024