About 1812, Fresnel was sent to 

Nyons, in the southern département of Drôme, to assist with the

imperial highway that was to connect Spain and Italy. [14] It is from Nyons that we have the first
evidence of his interest in optics. On 15 May 1814, while work was slack due to Napoleon's defeat,
[40]
 Fresnel wrote a "P.S." to his brother Léonor, saying in part:
I would also like to have papers that might tell me about the discoveries of French physicists on the
polarization of light. I saw in the Moniteur of a few months ago that Biot had read to the Institute a
very interesting memoir on the polarization of light. Though I break my head, I cannot guess what
that is.[41]
As late as 28 December he was still waiting for information, but he had received Biot's memoir by 10
February 1815.[42] (The Institut de France had taken over the functions of the French Académie des
Sciences and other académies in 1795. In 1816 the Académie des Sciences regained its name and
autonomy, but remained part of the institute.[43])
In March 1815, perceiving Napoleon's return from Elba as "an attack on civilization", [44] Fresnel
departed without leave, hastened to Toulouse and offered his services to the royalist resistance, but
soon found himself on the sick list. Returning to Nyons in defeat, he was threatened and had his
windows broken. During the Hundred Days he was placed on suspension, which he was eventually
allowed to spend at his mother's house in Mathieu. There he used his enforced leisure to begin his
optical experiments.[45]

Contributions to physical optics[edit]

Historical context: From Newton to Biot[edit]
The appreciation of Fresnel's reconstruction of physical optics might be assisted by an overview of
the fragmented state in which he found the subject. In this subsection, optical phenomena that were
unexplained or whose explanations were disputed are named in bold type.

Ordinary refraction from a medium of higher wave velocity to a medium of lower wave velocity, as understood
by Huygens. Successive positions of the wavefront are shown in blue before refraction, and in green after
refraction. For ordinary refraction, the secondary wavefronts (gray curves) are spherical, so that the rays
(straight gray lines) are perpendicular to the wavefronts.

The corpuscular theory of light, favored by Isaac Newton and accepted by nearly all of Fresnel's
seniors, easily explained rectilinear propagation: the corpuscles obviously moved very fast, so that
their paths were very nearly straight. The wave theory, as developed by Christiaan Huygens in
his Treatise on Light (1690), explained rectilinear propagation on the assumption that each point
crossed by a traveling wavefront becomes the source of a secondary wavefront. Given the initial
position of a traveling wavefront, any later position (according to Huygens) was the
common tangent surface (envelope) of the secondary wavefronts emitted from the earlier position.
  As the extent of the common tangent was limited by the extent of the initial wavefront, the
[46]

repeated application of Huygens's construction to a plane wavefront of limited extent (in a uniform
medium) gave a straight, parallel beam. While this construction indeed predicted rectilinear
propagation, it was difficult to reconcile with the common observation that wavefronts on the surface
of water can bend around obstructions, and with the similar behavior of sound waves – causing
Newton to maintain, to the end of his life, that if light consisted of waves it would "bend and spread
every way" into the shadows.[47]
Huygens's theory neatly explained the law of ordinary reflection and the law of ordinary
refraction ("Snell's law"), provided that the secondary waves traveled slower in denser media (those
of higher refractive index).[48] The corpuscular theory, with the hypothesis that the corpuscles were
subject to forces acting perpendicular to surfaces, explained the same laws equally well, [49] albeit with
the implication that light traveled faster in denser media; that implication was wrong, but could not be
directly disproven with the technology of Newton's time or even Fresnel's time (see Fizeau–Foucault
apparatus).
Similarly inconclusive was stellar aberration—that is, the apparent change in the position of a star
due to the velocity of the earth across the line of sight (not to be confused with stellar parallax, which
is due to the displacement of the earth across the line of sight). Identified by James Bradley in 1728,
stellar aberration was widely taken as confirmation of the corpuscular theory. But it was equally
compatible with the wave theory, as Euler noted in 1746 – tacitly assuming that the aether (the
supposed wave-bearing medium) near the earth was not disturbed by the motion of the earth. [50]
The outstanding strength of Huygens's theory was his explanation of the birefringence (double
refraction) of "Iceland crystal" (transparent calcite), on the assumption that the secondary waves are
spherical for the ordinary refraction (which satisfies Snell's law) and spheroidal for
the extraordinary refraction (which does not).[51] In general, Huygens's common-tangent construction
implies that rays are paths of least time between successive positions of the wavefront, in
accordance with Fermat's principle.[52][53] In the special case of isotropic media, the secondary
wavefronts must be spherical, and Huygens's construction then implies that the rays are
perpendicular to the wavefront; indeed, the law of ordinary refraction can be separately derived from
that premise, as Ignace-Gaston Pardies did before Huygens.[54]

Altered colors of skylight reflected in a soap bubble, due to thin-film interference (formerly called "thin-plate"
interference)

Although Newton rejected the wave theory, he noticed its potential to explain colors, including the
colors of "thin plates" (e.g., "Newton's rings", and the colors of skylight reflected in soap bubbles),
on the assumption that light consists of periodic waves, with the
lowest frequencies (longest wavelengths) at the red end of the spectrum, and the highest
frequencies (shortest wavelengths) at the violet end. In 1672 he published a heavy hint to that effect,
[55][56]:5088–9
 but contemporary supporters of the wave theory failed to act on it: Robert Hooke treated light
as a periodic sequence of pulses but did not use frequency as the criterion of color, [57] while Huygens
treated the waves as individual pulses without any periodicity; [58] and Pardies died young in 1673.
Newton himself tried to explain colors of thin plates using the corpuscular theory, by supposing that
his corpuscles had the wavelike property of alternating between "fits of easy transmission" and "fits
of easy reflection",[59] the distance between like "fits" depending on the color and the medium  [60] and,
awkwardly, on the angle of refraction or reflection into that medium. [61][62]:1144 More awkwardly still, this
theory required thin plates to reflect only at the back surface, although thick plates manifestly
reflected also at the front surface.[63] It was not until 1801 that Thomas Young, in the Bakerian
Lecture for that year, cited Newton's hint, [64]:18–19 and accounted for the colors of a thin plate as the
combined effect of the front and back reflections, which reinforce or cancel each other according to
the wavelength and the thickness.[64]:37–9 Young similarly explained the colors of "striated surfaces"
(e.g., gratings) as the wavelength-dependent reinforcement or cancellation of reflections from
adjacent lines.[64]:35–7 He described this reinforcement or cancellation as interference.

Thomas Young (1773–1829)

Neither Newton nor Huygens satisfactorily explained diffraction—the blurring and fringing of

shadows where, according to rectilinear propagation, they ought to be sharp. Newton, who called
diffraction "inflexion", supposed that rays of light passing close to obstacles were bent ("inflected");
but his explanation was only qualitative.[65] Huygens's common-tangent construction, without
modifications, could not accommodate diffraction at all. Two such modifications were proposed by
Young in the same 1801 Bakerian Lecture: first, that the secondary waves near the edge of an
obstacle could diverge into the shadow, but only weakly, due to limited reinforcement from other
secondary waves;[64]:25–7 and second, that diffraction by an edge was caused by interference between
two rays: one reflected off the edge, and the other inflected while passing near the edge. The latter
ray would be undeviated if sufficiently far from the edge, but Young did not elaborate on that case.
[64]:42–4
 These were the earliest suggestions that the degree of diffraction depends on wavelength.
[66]
 Later, in the 1803 Bakerian Lecture, Young ceased to regard inflection as a separate
phenomenon,[67] and produced evidence that diffraction fringes inside the shadow of a narrow
obstacle were due to interference: when the light from one side was blocked, the internal fringes
disappeared.[68] But Young was alone in such efforts until Fresnel entered the field. [69]
Huygens, in his investigation of double refraction, noticed something that he could not explain: when
light passes through two similarly oriented calcite crystals at normal incidence, the ordinary ray
emerging from the first crystal suffers only the ordinary refraction in the second, while the
extraordinary ray emerging from the first suffers only the extraordinary refraction in the second; but
when the second crystal is rotated 90° about the incident rays, the roles are interchanged, so that
the ordinary ray emerging from the first crystal suffers only the extraordinary refraction in the second,
and vice versa.[70] This discovery gave Newton another reason to reject the wave theory: rays of light
evidently had "sides".[71] Corpuscles could have sides [72] (or poles, as they would later be called); but
waves of light could not,[73] because (so it seemed) any such waves would need to
be longitudinal (with vibrations in the direction of propagation). Newton offered an alternative "Rule"
for the extraordinary refraction,[74] which rode on his authority through the 18th century, although he
made "no known attempt to deduce it from any principles of optics, corpuscular or otherwise."  [75]:327

Étienne-Louis Malus (1775–1812)

In 1808 the extraordinary refraction of calcite was investigated experimentally, with unprecedented
accuracy, by Étienne-Louis Malus, and found to be consistent with Huygens's spheroid construction,
not Newton's "Rule".[75] Malus, encouraged by Pierre-Simon Laplace,[62]:1146 then sought to explain this
law in corpuscular terms: from the known relation between the incident and refracted ray directions,
Malus derived the corpuscular velocity (as a function of direction) that would satisfy Maupertuis's
"least action" principle. But, as Young pointed out, the existence of such a velocity law was
guaranteed by Huygens's spheroid, because Huygens's construction leads to Fermat's principle,
which becomes Maupertuis's principle if the ray speed is replaced by the reciprocal of the particle
speed! The corpuscularists had not found a force law that would yield the alleged velocity law,
except by a circular argument in which a force acting at the surface of the crystal inexplicably
depended on the direction of the (possibly subsequent) velocity within the crystal. Worse, it was
doubtful that any such force would satisfy the conditions of Maupertuis's principle. [76] In contrast,
Young proceeded to show that "a medium more easily compressible in one direction than in any
direction perpendicular to it, as if it consisted of an infinite number of parallel plates connected by a
substance somewhat less elastic" admits spheroidal longitudinal wavefronts, as Huygens supposed.
[77]
Printed label seen through a doubly-refracting calcite crystal and a modern polarizing filter (rotated to show the
different polarizations of the two images)

But Malus, in the midst of his experiments on double refraction, noticed something else: when a ray
of light is reflected off a non-metallic surface at the appropriate angle, it behaves like one of the two
rays emerging from a calcite crystal.[78] It was Malus who coined the term polarization to describe
this behavior, although the polarizing angle became known as Brewster's angle after its
dependence on the refractive index was determined experimentally by David Brewster in 1815.
[79]
 Malus also introduced the term plane of polarization. In the case of polarization by reflection, his
"plane of polarization" was the plane of the incident and reflected rays; in modern terms, this is the
plane normal to the electric vibration. In 1809, Malus further discovered that the intensity of light
passing through two polarizers is proportional to the squared cosine of the angle between their
planes of polarization (Malus's law),[80] whether the polarizers work by reflection or double refraction,
and that all birefringent crystals produce both extraordinary refraction and polarization. [81] As the
corpuscularists started trying to explain these things in terms of polar "molecules" of light, the wave-
theorists had no working hypothesis on the nature of polarization, prompting Young to remark that
Malus's observations "present greater difficulties to the advocates of the undulatory theory than any
other facts with which we are acquainted."  [82]
Malus died in February 1812, at the age of 36, shortly after receiving the Rumford Medal for his work
on polarization.
In August 1811, François Arago reported that if a thin plate of mica was viewed against a white
polarized backlight through a calcite crystal, the two images of the mica were of complementary
colors (the overlap having the same color as the background). The light emerging from the mica was
"depolarized" in the sense that there was no orientation of the calcite that made one image
disappear; yet it was not ordinary ("unpolarized") light, for which the two images would be of the
same color. Rotating the calcite around the line of sight changed the colors, though they remained
complementary. Rotating the mica changed the saturation (not the hue) of the colors. This
phenomenon became known as chromatic polarization. Replacing the mica with a much thicker
plate of quartz, with its faces perpendicular to the optic axis (the axis of Huygens's spheroid or
Malus's velocity function), produced a similar effect, except that rotating the quartz made no
difference. Arago tried to explain his observations in corpuscular terms.[83]

Rêveries[edit]
Bas-relief of Fresnel's uncle Léonor Mérimée (1757–1836), on the same wall as the Fresnel monument in
Broglie[7]

Fresnel's letters from later in 1814 reveal his interest in the wave theory, including his awareness
that it explained the constancy of the speed of light and was at least compatible with stellar
aberration. Eventually he compiled what he called his rêveries (musings) into an essay and
submitted it via Léonor Mérimée to André-Marie Ampère, who did not respond directly. But on 19
December, Mérimée dined with Ampère and Arago, with whom he was acquainted through the École
Polytechnique; and Arago promised to look at Fresnel's essay.[92][Note 2]
In mid 1815, on his way home to Mathieu to serve his suspension, Fresnel met Arago in Paris and
spoke of the wave theory and stellar aberration. He was informed that he was trying to break down
open doors ("il enfonçait des portes ouvertes"), and directed to classical works on optics.[93]

Diffraction[edit]
First attempt (1815)[edit]
On 12 July 1815, as Fresnel was about to leave Paris, Arago left him a note on a new topic:
I do not know of any book that contains all the experiments that physicists are doing on
the diffraction of light. M'sieur Fresnel will only be able to get to know this part of the optics by
reading the work by Grimaldi, the one by Newton, the English treatise by Jordan, [94] and the memoirs
of Brougham and Young, which are part of the collection of the Philosophical Transactions.[95]
Fresnel would not have ready access to these works outside Paris, and could not read English.
[96]
 But, in Mathieu – with a point-source of light made by focusing sunlight with a drop of honey, a
crude micrometer of his own construction, and supporting apparatus made by a local locksmith – he
began his own experiments.[97] His technique was novel: whereas earlier investigators had projected
the fringes onto a screen, Fresnel soon abandoned the screen and observed the fringes in space,
through a lens with the micrometer at its focus, allowing more accurate measurements while
requiring less light.[98]
Later in July, after Napoleon's final defeat, Fresnel was reinstated with the advantage of having
backed the winning side. He requested a two-month leave of absence, which was readily granted
because roadworks were in abeyance. [99]
On 23 September he wrote to Arago, beginning "I think I have found the explanation and the law of
colored fringes which one notices in the shadows of bodies illuminated by a luminous point." In the
same paragraph, however, Fresnel implicitly acknowledged doubt about the novelty of his work:
noting that he would need to incur some expense in order to improve his measurements, he wanted
to know "whether this is not useless, and whether the law of diffraction has not already been
established by sufficiently exact experiments."  [100] He explained that he had not yet had a chance to
acquire the items on his reading lists,[96] with the apparent exception of "Young's book", which he
could not understand without his brother's help. [101][Note 3]  Not surprisingly, he had retraced many of
Young's steps.
In a memoir sent to the institute on 15 October 1815, Fresnel mapped the external and internal
fringes in the shadow of a wire. He noticed, like Young before him, that the internal fringes
disappeared when the light from one side was blocked, and concluded that "the vibrations of two
rays that cross each other under a very small angle can contradict each other…"  [102] But, whereas
Young took the disappearance of the internal fringes as confirmation of the principle of interference,
Fresnel reported that it was the internal fringes that first drew his attention to the principle. To explain
the diffraction pattern, Fresnel constructed the internal fringes by considering the intersections of
circular wavefronts emitted from the two edges of the obstruction, and the external fringes by
considering the intersections between direct waves and waves reflected off the nearer edge. For the
external fringes, to obtain tolerable agreement with observation, he had to suppose that the reflected
wave was inverted; and he noted that the predicted paths of the fringes were hyperbolic. In the part
of the memoir that most clearly surpassed Young, Fresnel explained the ordinary laws of reflection
and refraction in terms of interference, noting that if two parallel rays were reflected or refracted at
other than the prescribed angle, they would no longer have the same phase in a common
perpendicular plane, and every vibration would be cancelled by a nearby vibration. He noted that his
explanation was valid provided that the surface irregularities were much smaller than the
wavelength.[103]
On 10 November, Fresnel sent a supplementary note dealing with Newton's rings and with gratings,
[104]
 including, for the first time, transmission gratings – although in that case the interfering rays were
still assumed to be "inflected", and the experimental verification was inadequate because it used
only two threads.[105]
As Fresnel was not a member of the institute, the fate of his memoir depended heavily on the report
of a single member. The reporter for Fresnel's memoir turned out to be Arago (with Poinsot as the
other reviewer).[106] On 8 November, Arago wrote to Fresnel:
I have been instructed by the Institute to examine your memoir on the diffraction of light; I have
studied it carefully, and found many interesting experiments, some of which had already been done
by Dr. Thomas Young, who in general regards this phenomenon in a manner rather analogous to the
one you have adopted. But what neither he nor anyone had seen before you is that
the external colored bands do not travel in a straight line as one moves away from the opaque body.
The results you have achieved in this regard seem to me very important; perhaps they can serve to
prove the truth of the undulatory system, so often and so feebly combated by physicists who have
not bothered to understand it.[107]
Fresnel was troubled, wanting to know more precisely where he had collided with Young.
[108]
 Concerning the curved paths of the "colored bands", Young had noted the hyperbolic paths of the
fringes in the two-source interference pattern, corresponding roughly to Fresnel's internal fringes,
and had described the hyperbolic fringes that appear on the screen within rectangular shadows.
[109]
 He had not mentioned the curved paths of the external fringes of a shadow; but, as he later
explained,[110] that was because Newton had already done so.[111] Newton evidently thought the fringes
were caustics. Thus Arago erred in his belief that the curved paths of the fringes were fundamentally
incompatible with the corpuscular theory.[112]
Arago's letter went on to request more data on the external fringes. Fresnel complied, until he
exhausted his leave and was assigned to Rennes in the département of Ille-et-Vilaine. At this point
Arago interceded with Gaspard de Prony, head of the École des Ponts, who wrote to Louis-Mathieu
Molé, head of the Corps des Ponts, suggesting that the progress of science and the prestige of the
Corps would be enhanced if Fresnel could come to Paris for a time. He arrived in March 1816, and
his leave was subsequently extended through the middle of the year. [113]
Meanwhile, in an experiment reported on 26 February 1816, Arago verified Fresnel's prediction that
the internal fringes were shifted if the rays on one side of the obstacle passed through a thin glass
lamina. Fresnel correctly attributed this phenomenon to the lower wave velocity in the glass. [114] Arago
later used a similar argument to explain the colors in the scintillation of stars. [Note 4]
Fresnel's updated memoir [115] was eventually published in the March 1816 issue of Annales de
Chimie et de Physique, of which Arago had recently become co-editor.[116] That issue did not actually
appear until May.[117] In March, Fresnel already had competition: Biot read a memoir on diffraction by
himself and his student Claude Pouillet, containing copious data and arguing that the regularity of
diffraction fringes, like the regularity of Newton's rings, must be linked to Newton's "fits". But the new
link was not rigorous, and Pouillet himself would become a distinguished early adopter of the wave
theory.[118]
"Efficacious ray", double-mirror experiment (1816) [edit]

Replica of Young's two-source interference diagram (1807), with sources A and B producing minima at C, D, E,
and F[119]

Fresnel's double mirror (1816). The mirror segments M1 and M2 produce virtual images S1 and S2 of the slit S. In
the shaded region, the beams from the two virtual images overlap and interfere in the manner of Young
(above).

On 24 May 1816, Fresnel wrote to Young (in French), acknowledging how little of his own memoir
was new.[120] But in a "supplement" signed on 14 July and read the next day, [121] Fresnel noted that the
internal fringes were more accurately predicted by supposing that the two interfering rays came from
some distance outside the edges of the obstacle. To explain this, he divided the incident wavefront
at the obstacle into what we now call Fresnel zones, such that the secondary waves from each zone
were spread over half a cycle when they arrived at the observation point. The zones on one side of
the obstacle largely canceled out in pairs, except the first zone, which was represented by an
"efficacious ray". This approach worked for the internal fringes, but the superposition of the
efficacious ray and the direct ray did not work for the external fringes.[122]
The contribution from the "efficacious ray" was thought to be only partly canceled, for reasons
involving the dynamics of the medium: where the wavefront was continuous, symmetry forbade
oblique vibrations; but near the obstacle that truncated the wavefront, the asymmetry allowed some
sideways vibration towards the geometric shadow. This argument showed that Fresnel had not (yet)
fully accepted Huygens's principle, which would have permitted oblique radiation from all portions of
the front.[123]
In the same supplement, Fresnel described his well-known double mirror, comprising two flat mirrors
joined at an angle of slightly less than 180°, with which he produced a two-slit interference pattern
from two virtual images of the same slit. A conventional double-slit experiment required a
preliminary single slit to ensure that the light falling on the double slit was coherent (synchronized).
In Fresnel's version, the preliminary single slit was retained, and the double slit was replaced by the
double mirror – which bore no physical resemblance to the double slit and yet performed the same
function. This result (which had been announced by Arago in the March issue of the Annales) made
it hard to believe that the two-slit pattern had anything to do with corpuscles being deflected as they
passed near the edges of the slits.[124]
But 1816 was the "Year Without a Summer": crops failed; hungry farming families lined the streets of
Rennes; the central government organized "charity workhouses" for the needy; and in October,
Fresnel was sent back to Ille-et-Vilaine to supervise charity workers in addition to his regular road
crew.[125] According to Arago,
with Fresnel conscientiousness was always the foremost part of his character, and he constantly
performed his duties as an engineer with the most rigorous scrupulousness. The mission to defend
the revenues of the state, to obtain for them the best employment possible, appeared to his eyes in
the light of a question of honour. The functionary, whatever might be his rank, who submitted to him
an ambiguous account, became at once the object of his profound contempt. … Under such
circumstances the habitual gentleness of his manners disappeared… [126]
Fresnel's letters from December 1816 reveal his consequent anxiety. To Arago he complained of
being "tormented by the worries of surveillance, and the need to reprimand…" And to Mérimée he
wrote: "I find nothing more tiresome than having to manage other men, and I admit that I have no
idea what I'm doing." [127]
Prize memoir (1818) and sequel[edit]
On 17 March 1817, the Académie des Sciences announced that diffraction would be the topic for the
biannual physics Grand Prix to be awarded in 1819.[128] The deadline for entries was set at 1 August
1818 to allow time for replication of experiments. Although the wording of the problem referred to
rays and inflection and did not invite wave-based solutions, Arago and Ampère encouraged Fresnel
to enter.[129]
In the fall of 1817, Fresnel, supported by de Prony, obtained a leave of absence from the new head
of the Corp des Ponts, Louis Becquey, and returned to Paris.[130] He resumed his engineering duties
in the spring of 1818; but from then on he was based in Paris,[131] first on the Canal de l'Ourcq,[132] and
then (from May 1819) with the cadastre of the pavements.[133][134]:486
On 15 January 1818, in a different context (revisited below), Fresnel showed that the addition of
sinusoidal functions of the same frequency but different phases is analogous to the addition of forces
with different directions.[135] His method was similar to the phasor representation, except that the
"forces" were plane vectors rather than complex numbers; they could be added, and multiplied
by scalars, but not (yet) multiplied and divided by each other. The explanation was algebraic rather
than geometric.
Knowledge of this method was assumed in a preliminary note on diffraction, [136] dated 19 April 1818
and deposited on 20 April, in which Fresnel outlined the elementary theory of diffraction as found in
modern textbooks. He restated Huygens's principle in combination with the superposition principle,
saying that the vibration at each point on a wavefront is the sum of the vibrations that would be sent
to it at that moment by all the elements of the wavefront in any of its previous positions, all elements
acting separately (see Huygens–Fresnel principle). For a wavefront partly obstructed in a previous
position, the summation was to be carried out over the unobstructed portion. In directions other than
the normal to the primary wavefront, the secondary waves were weakened due to obliquity, but
weakened much more by destructive interference, so that the effect of obliquity alone could be
ignored.[137] For diffraction by a straight edge, the intensity as a function of distance from the
geometric shadow could then be expressed with sufficient accuracy in terms of what are now called
the normalized Fresnel integrals:

Normalized Fresnel integrals C(x) , S(x)

Diffraction fringes near the limit of the geometric shadow of a straight edge. Light intensities were calculated
from the values of the normalized integrals C(x) , S(x)

  ;   
The same note included a table of the integrals, for an upper limit ranging from 0 to 5.1 in steps
of 0.1, computed with a mean error of 0.0003,[138] plus a smaller table of maxima and minima of
the resulting intensity.
In his final "Memoir on the diffraction of light",[139] deposited on 29 July [140] and bearing the Latin
epigraph "Natura simplex et fecunda" ("Nature simple and fertile"),[141] Fresnel slightly expanded
the two tables without changing the existing figures, except for a correction to the first minimum
of intensity. For completeness, he repeated his solution to "the problem of interference",
whereby sinusoidal functions are added like vectors. He acknowledged the directionality of the
secondary sources and the variation in their distances from the observation point, chiefly to
explain why these things make negligible difference in the context, provided of course that the
secondary sources do not radiate in the retrograde direction. Then, applying his theory of
interference to the secondary waves, he expressed the intensity of light diffracted by a single
straight edge (half-plane) in terms of integrals which involved the dimensions of the problem, but
which could be converted to the normalized forms above. With reference to the integrals, he
explained the calculation of the maxima and minima of the intensity (external fringes), and noted
that the calculated intensity falls very rapidly as one moves into the geometric shadow. [142] The
last result, as Olivier Darrigol says, "amounts to a proof of the rectilinear propagation of light in
the wave theory, indeed the first proof that a modern physicist would still accept."  [143]
For the experimental testing of his calculations, Fresnel used red light with a wavelength of
638 nm, which he deduced from the diffraction pattern in the simple case in which light incident
on a single slit was focused by a cylindrical lens. For a variety of distances from the source to
the obstacle and from the obstacle to the field point, he compared the calculated and observed
positions of the fringes for diffraction by a half-plane, a slit, and a narrow strip – concentrating on
the minima, which were visually sharper than the maxima. For the slit and the strip, he could not
use the previously computed table of maxima and minima; for each combination of dimensions,
the intensity had to be expressed in terms of sums or differences of Fresnel integrals and
calculated from the table of integrals, and the extrema had to be calculated anew. [144] The
agreement between calculation and measurement was better than 1.5% in almost every case. [145]
Near the end of the memoir, Fresnel summed up the difference between Huygens's use of
secondary waves and his own: whereas Huygens says there is light only where the secondary
waves exactly agree, Fresnel says there is complete darkness only where the secondary waves
exactly cancel out.[146]