This history of interferometry has many surprising back stories surrounding the scientists who discovered and explored one of the most important aspects of the physics of light—interference. From Thomas Young who first proposed the law of interference, and Augustin Fresnel and Francois Arago who explored its properties, to Albert Michelson, who went almost mad grappling with literal firestorms surrounding his work, these scientists overcame personal and professional obstacles on their quest to uncover light’s secrets. The book’s stories, told around the topic of optics, tells us something more general about human endeavor as scientists pursue science.

Interference: The History of Optical Interferometry and the Scientists who Tamed Light, was published Ag. 6 and is available at Oxford University Press and Amazon. Here is a brief preview of the frist several chapters:

Chapter 1. Thomas Young Polymath: The Law of Interference

Thomas Young was the ultimate dabbler, his interests and explorations ranged far and wide, from ancient egyptology to naval engineering, from physiology of perception to the physics of sound and light. Yet unlike most dabblers who accomplish little, he made original and seminal contributions to all these fields. Some have called him the “Last Man Who Knew Everything”.

The chapter, Thomas Young Polymath: The Law of Interference, begins with the story of the invasion of Egypt in 1798 by Napoleon Bonaparte as the unlikely link among a set of epic discoveries that launched the modern science of light.  The story of interferometry passes from the Egyptian campaign and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone to Thomas Young.  Young was a polymath, known for his facility with languages that helped him decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics aided by the Rosetta Stone.  He was also a city doctor who advised the admiralty on the construction of ships, and he became England’s premier physicist at the beginning of the nineteenth century, building on the wave theory of Huygens, as he challenged Newton’s particles of light.  But his theory of the wave nature of light was controversial, attracting sharp criticism that would pass on the task of refuting Newton to a new generation of French optical physicists.

Chapter 2. The Fresnel Connection: Particles versus Waves

Augustin Fresnel was an intuitive genius whose talents were almost squandered on his job building roads and bridges in the backwaters of France until he was discovered and rescued by Francois Arago.

The Fresnel Connection: Particles versus Waves describes the campaign of Arago and Fresnel to prove the wave nature of light based on Fresnel’s theory of interfering waves in diffraction.  Although the discovery of the polarization of light by Etienne Malus posed a stark challenge to the undulationists, the application of wave interference, with the superposition principle of Daniel Bernoulli, provided the theoretical framework for the ultimate success of the wave theory.  The final proof came through the dramatic demonstration of the Spot of Arago.

Chapter 3. At Light Speed: The Birth of Interferometry

There is no question that Francois Arago was a swashbuckler. His life’s story reads like an adventure novel as he went from being marooned in hostile lands early in his career to becoming prime minister of France after the 1848 revolutions swept across Europe.

At Light Speed: The Birth of Interferometry tells how Arago attempted to use Snell’s Law to measure the effect of the Earth’s motion through space but found no effect, in contradiction to predictions using Newton’s particle theory of light.  Direct measurements of the speed of light were made by Hippolyte Fizeau and Leon Foucault who originally began as collaborators but had an epic falling-out that turned into an  intense competition.  Fizeau won priority for the first measurement, but Foucault surpassed him by using the Arago interferometer to measure the speed of light in air and water with increasing accuracy.  Jules Jamin later invented one of the first interferometric instruments for use as a refractometer.

Chapter 4. After the Gold Rush: The Trials of Albert Michelson

No name is more closely connected to interferometry than that of Albert Michelson. He succeeded, sometimes at great personal cost, in launching interferometric metrology as one of the most important tools used by scientists today.

After the Gold Rush: The Trials of Albert Michelson tells the story of Michelson’s youth growing up in the gold fields of California before he was granted an extraordinary appointment to Annapolis by President Grant. Michelson invented his interferometer while visiting Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin, Germany, as he sought to detect the motion of the Earth through the luminiferous ether, but no motion was detected. After returning to the States and a faculty position at Case University, he met Edward Morley, and the two continued the search for the Earth’s motion, concluding definitively its absence.  The Michelson interferometer launched a menagerie of interferometers (including the Fabry-Perot interferometer) that ushered in the golden age of interferometry.

Chapter 5. Stellar Interference: Measuring the Stars

Learning from his attempts to measure the speed of light through the ether, Michelson realized that the partial coherence of light from astronomical sources could be used to measure their sizes. His first measurements using the Michelson Stellar Interferometer launched a major subfield of astronomy that is one of the most active today.

Stellar Interference: Measuring the Stars brings the story of interferometry to the stars as Michelson proposed stellar interferometry, first demonstrated on the Galilean moons of Jupiter, followed by an application developed by Karl Schwarzschild for binary stars, and completed by Michelson with observations encouraged by George Hale on the star Betelgeuse.  However, the Michelson stellar interferometry had stability limitations that were overcome by Hanbury Brown and Richard Twiss who developed intensity interferometry based on the effect of photon bunching.  The ultimate resolution of telescopes was achieved after the development of adaptive optics that used interferometry to compensate for atmospheric turbulence.

And More

The last 5 chapters bring the story from Michelson’s first stellar interferometer into the present as interferometry is used today to search for exoplanets, to image distant black holes half-way across the universe and to detect gravitational waves using the most sensitive scientific measurement apparatus ever devised.

Chapter 6. Across the Universe: Exoplanets, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves

Moving beyond the measurement of star sizes, interferometry lies at the heart of some of the most dramatic recent advances in astronomy, including the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, the imaging of distant black holes and the detection of nearby exoplanets that may one day be visited by unmanned probes sent from Earth.

Chapter 7. Two Faces of Microscopy: Diffraction and Interference

The complement of the telescope is the microscope. Interference microscopy allows invisible things to become visible and for fundamental limits on image resolution to be blown past with super-resolution at the nanoscale, revealing the intricate workings of biological systems with unprecedented detail.

Chapter 8. Holographic Dreams of Princess Leia: Crossing Beams

Holography is the direct legacy of Young’s double slit experiment, as coherent sources of light interfere to record, and then reconstruct, the direct scattered fields from illuminated objects. Holographic display technology promises to revolutionize virtual reality.

Chapter 9. Photon Interference: The Foundations of Quantum Communication and Computing

Quantum information science, at the forefront of physics and technology today, owes much of its power to the principle of interference among single photons.

Chapter 10. The Quantum Advantage: Interferometric Computing

Photonic quantum systems have the potential to usher in a new information age using interference in photonic integrated circuits.