Young's experiment

Thomas Young was an English medical doctor. He learnt to read at two and is said to have read the bible twice at four. He was interested in almost everything. He proved that light had wave properties by placing a tiny slip of card (one thirteenth of an inch wide) in a narrow beam of sunlight that entered a room through a tiny hole in a window shutter. The card divided the light into two very narrow beams that produced interference fringes on a screen (the opposite wall). Young's original observation (~1801) was actually a double beam experiment, but he is remembered for double slit observations that came a little later. Slightly colored white light fringes appear on either side of the shadow of a sate skewer on the wall of a darkened room. Note: ihe image on the wall was pale with low contrast; only the first of the series of ten to twelve fringes are seen in this digital image.

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