What is the main scientific significance of Youngs Double slit experiment?
Historically, Young’s Double slit experiment, when it was first carried out by Young in 1801, demonstrated that light was a wave, which seemed to settle for once and all the debate whether light was corpuscular (particle-like) or wave. Up until that time, Newton’s corpuscular was the prevailing view of light, in spite of alternate explanations such as Huygens’ wave front model (which had some serious shortcomings). After Young’s demonstration of the wave properties of light, followed by work by others such as Fresnel studying the interference and diffraction properties of it, and especially after Maxwell’s brilliant equations of electromagnetism, physicists in the 19th century rejected Newton’s corpuscular theory and believed that light was a wave. The interesting story parallel to this was that although the “atomic theory” of matter had been first suggested by some early Greek scientists, and seemed to be bolstered by 18th century and early 19th century stochiochemistry, towards then
