PHYS 206 – Waves & Modern Physics

Group Assignment 2
Oct. 26, 2023

Strange Light
Feyerabendian Perspectives on the Wave-Particle Debate in Europe,
1600-1900

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Matias Contal ... [1]
 i. Opening Remarks

To start, we’ve given our essay a nice little title that captures some of the feeling we thought
appropriate to a ‘Feyerabendian’ take on this bit of science history. The title is closely drawn
from a short essay by French physicist Alain Aspect, on the history of the wave-particle debate.
His piece, ‘Weird Light,’ was published in 2017, and in 2022 Aspect was awarded the Nobel
Prize in physics for his work on entanglement. 1

We’ll be looking at the history of the wave-particle debate through the lens of Austrian
philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend’s (1924-1994) ideas. We here provide the most abridged
possible recap of Feyerabend’s main ideas, by way of four choice quotes, to anchor subsequent
developments:

“The idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on

too naive a view of man and his social surroundings.”

“There are circumstances when it is advisable to introduce, elaborate,

and defend ad hoc hypotheses.”

“No single theory ever agrees with all the known facts in its domain.”

“The 'facts' that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain
way and are, therefore, essentially ideational.” 2

We break our history of the wave-particle debate up by century, into three general chapters:
The 17th century, during which a vigorous debate emerges in Europe as to the nature of light;
the 18th century, during which Newton’s ideas about the particle nature of light reign supreme;
and the 19th century where the debate reemerges and the wave theory of light eventually comes
out victorious; as we’ll see, this is a highly idealized, simplified telling of the story. Finally we’ll
allude to the ‘conclusion’ of this debate, at the start of the 1900s.

We try to limit the science history to what is relevant for our treatment of Feyerabend, and
we’ll conclude each segment with our Feyerabendian impressions on the developments of that
century. We’ll see that this is a history that serves Feyerabend’s ideas really quite well.

1
Nobelprize.org. (2022). The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2022/aspect/interview/
2
Feyerabend, P. K. (2010). Against Method (4th ed.). Verso Books.
1. 1600s – Early Debate

By the mid 17th century, the scientific revolution is approaching its zenith. Aristotelianism
is on the way out, atomism is on the way in.[3] Empiricism and the mathematization of natural
philosophy are taking off thanks to the foundation laid by Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler earlier
in the century, helped along by Tycho Brahe’s incredibly detailed, voluminous recordings of
astronomical phenomena. Copernicus’ heliocentrism has gained considerable ground, thanks to
Galileo’s efforts.
Against this backdrop, a debate emerges regarding the nature of light. Let us provide a
warpspeed tour of some of its early participants.

Pierre Gassendi, an atomist, a member of the Parisian intellectual scene. An early

proponent of empiricism, conjectures light to be made of particles that move at very high speed.
These particles, unaffected by the medium of propagation. He also believes sound to operate in a
similar manner. 3
René Descartes, also draws a parallel between light and sound, but takes both phenomena
to consist of waves. He, we now know, correctly reasons or observes that sound waves propagate
faster in denser media, and so he draws a parallel regarding light. In fact, some sources tell us he
takes the speed of light to be infinite. 4 The medium of propagation for these very much
mechanical waves, he images as a pervasive, elastic medium.
Francesco Grimaldi at this time makes observations of diffraction effects, a point we’ll
return to later, and resultantly puts his stock in the wave account; Roberte Hooke also considers
light to be vibrations in the medium through which they propagate. 5

A chief concern for both models at this early stage of development was to explain both
reflection and refraction.
Here Huygens, towards the end of the 16th century provides the most complete account of
how any mechanical wave could exhibit both properties. 6 The model of wave propagation we are
still taught today, which relies on ‘wavelets’ acting as point sources of spherical wavefronts at
every point along the macroscopic wavefronts we observe. In order to account for refraction, the
theory notably postulates that light moves slower in more optically dense media. Perhaps most
significantly for later developments, the basic theory also allows for interference and diffraction
effects, by way of the superposition of wave amplitudes.

Now, we come to Isaac Newton. The late 17th century giant of science, famous in his own
lifetime for his development of laws of universal gravitation and of calculus, among other
notable achievements, takes light to be made of particles, or ‘corpuscles’. The theory accounts
more easily than Snell’s in terms of the laws of reflection that are already known from Al
Haytham and Snell, in ways we shall discuss shortly.

As for dispersion, a phenomenon Newton studies in detail, he posits that different coloured
corpuscles are responsible for the different colours of light observed. On refraction, he gives the
following account: Light particles experience some attractive force with respect to the atoms of
different media. With the attractive force being greater the more optically dense the medium.
3
Bloch, O. (1971). The Philosophy of Gassendi. Ny: Basic Books
4
Descartes, R. (1983). Principles of Philosophy. Reidel.
5
Hooke, R. (1705). Posthumous works of Robert Hooke. Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford.
6
Huygens, C. (1690). Traité de la lumière.
When a particle is moving ‘deep’ in some medium, for example, glass, it is surrounded on all
sides by an effectively ‘equal’ number of glass particles. Resulting in the attractive forces being
exerted by these on the light particle, negating the particle. However, when the particle is
moving in air and approaches an interface with glass, the glass attracts it. Deflecting the light's
trajectory towards the normal of the interface. The opposite happens on its way back out of the
glass. For the brief moment that the corpuscle is back in air, but still close to the interface and
between the media, the glass bends its trajectory towards the interface. Which in this case means
away from the normal.

This is a rudimentary but sufficient structure of some principal theories at this early stage of the
grand debate. The question we ask, in order to probe its validity, is ‘Who is being ‘reasonable?
Who is defending ad hoc hypotheses?’. Feyerabend would likely tell us to be wary of our
‘narrativist’ biases.

Huygens’ wavelet theory, for example, or Newton’s account of refraction, might seem elegant,
sophisticated, prescient, in that they brought to bear principles in continued use today.
Descartes’ or Gassendi’s theories might sound daring and ad hoc – this is at least partly due to
how the science-historical retelling tends to compress the ‘losers’ of science, reducing their
theories to one-liners that science today tells us are ‘incorrect.’

Many of these and subsequent theories – especially as the mathematization of physics

continued unabated in the 1700s – were surely well-formalized, elegant, mathematically
sophisticated, self-consistent, and so on. They were surely ‘good theories’ within a given region
of their pertinent domains, to put it very Feyerabendianly. It is a worthwhile exercise to scan
oneself, throughout the story being told, for hidden feelings of intellectual superiority over what
might appear as thinly substantiated hypotheses. Is there some small part of us that feels tacitly
smug? Though it is an anecdotal assertion to make, we suggest that pop- science-history
sometimes has a tendency to flatter the reader – we are made to feel more empirical or more
rational than the early researchers, because we know the ‘right’ answers, however hand-wavy
and vague our understanding of them might be, and however much they arrive to us from on
high as the accumulated effort of tens, or even hundreds of thousands, of scientists in the
intervening period.
All this to say that the losers are surely not such losers. Contrastingly, we tend to remember
only the winners’ most winning theories. Feyerabend tells us that even the totemic intellect that
was Newton had his big, conjectural leaps:

“A more specific example of a theory with qualitative defects is

Newton's theory of colours. [...] Considering that the surface of mirrors
is much rougher than the lateral extension of the rays, the ray theory is
found to be inconsistent with the existence of mirror images (as is
admitted by Newton himself: if light consists of rays, then a mirror
should behave like a rough surface, i.e. it should look to us like a wall.
Newton retained his theory, eliminating the diiculty with the help of
an ad hoc hypothesis: 'the reflection of a ray is efected, not by a
single point of the reflecting body, but by some power of the body
which is evenly difused all over its surface'.”

In sum, all of these early theorists of light were using the observations and inherited
principles available to them at the time. Most importantly, from a Feyerabendian perspective:
Had they not been willing to make such leaps of the imagination, often with little to base
themselves off of, science would not have advanced.
 “ a strict principle of falsification, or a 'naive falsificationism' [...]
would wipe out science as we know it and would never have permitted
it to start.”

2. 1700s – Newton Reigns Supreme

By the early 18th century, secondary sources tell us we have Newton’s corpuscular theory
dominating the scientific consensus around the nature of light. 7
Why might this have been? We here provide some speculation, anchored in three ideas from
Feyerabend.

i. Sociological Biases

Newton, as we have mentioned, was widely held to be the most important scientist of the
previous century. His theories of universal gravitation had provided a mathematical
underpinning for Keplerian orbits and for the heliocentric, Copernican model of the solar
system. His work on calculus and the methods he developed for numerical approximation,
alone, would have cemented his legacy in mathematics. Like Galileo, he lived to be exceptionally
old for his time (84 years), and had been a prominent figure in academic life from his mid
twenties, allowing him to establish a vast camp of scientific admirers.
It seems perfectly reasonable, then, to assert a kind of ‘ad hominem’ component to the
corpuscular theory’s success: How could such a towering genius, held to be practically ‘sui
generis’ in the whole history of human thought, not be right on this, too?

ii. Physiological Biases

Furthermore, we make the assertion that the corpuscular theory is simply easier to
understand, in that it corresponds better to everyday physical phenomena for which we have a
‘built-in,’ natural, intuition.
Bouncing balls, playing billiards – these are still some of the analogies made when
introducing Snell’s Law of Reflection today. Whatever their 17th and 18th century equivalents
were (playing with marbles? Some kind of archaic bowling?) is hardly important; the basic ease
we have with this category of phenomena presumably goes back to throwing spears and hurtling
rocks at prey, and would’ve been as easily grasped by Newton’s contemporaries as by us in the
present.
Waves, by contrast, are non-local and thus harder to observe and to develop a deep
intuition for: All of us, surely, have at some time watched the surface of a lake in puzzlement,
7
Pierre van der Aa.8. Westfall, R. S. (1980). Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge
University Press.
trying in vain to follow its undulations. And Huygens’ formulation is still further removed from
experience: It goes so far as to invent, wholesale, the concept of a wavelet – something no 17th
century experimentalist could ever hope to observe – and then proceeds to successfully explain
the macroscopic phenomenon of wave propagation by appeal to this imaginary, one could say
‘fictitious,’ idea. In this sense Feyerabend would tell us it was perfectly reasonable for most
scientists to throw their lot in with the corpuscular theory.

iii. Formal Biases

Though closely related to the personalist reasons for corpuscular theory’s success (Newton’s
reputation), there is also the strictly formal appeal the theory would’ve held, given its greater
correspondence with the other ‘big ideas’ of the time. This seems obvious, given how many of
them came from Newton himself.
In Copernican cosmology, in Galileo’s development of inertia, in Kepler’s model of orbits
and in Newton’s magnum opus from prior in his career, the Principiae, everywhere we are
dealing with bodies in motion. Often, as in Newtonian gravitation, these are even treated as
‘point masses’ in space, with lines of attraction between them. And all of this, as we’ve seen, has
shown spectacular success in explaining phenomena on a cosmological scale. So why wouldn’t
we think it natural to apply the same basic ideas or ‘images’ to other phenomena?
Consider the corpuscular theory’s basic set of pictures: Infinitesimally small, presumably
round masses (‘point’ masses, if we like), proceeding in straight lines unless acted upon by
forces; disturbances, such as refraction, being also due to the unipolar attractive forces between
masses, causing deflection by acceleration and re-deflection by deceleration, with momentum
preserved throughout…
Clearly, the theories are practically one and the same! Who could resist the temptation to
see a comprehensive, self-consistent account of the universe in these theories of light and
gravitation. It seems far crazier, far less rational, to suppose that these principles which work so
well in one context simply go out of the window in another, wherein a totally different kind of
mechanics comes into play. This would almost be to suggest that nature is carved into totally
mutually exclusive domains, with whole different rulesets.
In this sense, we argue that – at least at this stage in its historical development –
proponents of wave theory would have been engaging in what Feyerabend would unambiguously
call ‘counterinduction.’

“[Counterinduction] advises us to introduce and elaborate hypotheses

which are inconsistent with well-established theories and/or
well-established facts.”

Besides whatever biases in the minds of scientists might have helped Newton’s theory along,
it would find seemingly conclusive confirmation in James Bradley’s work on stellar aberration in
the 1720s.
Such is logically the case with theories that gain an initial edge over their alternatives: As a
theory accrues successes, it invites further uses still, and enters a virtuous cycle. Feyerabend
would argue that in this process there are always ‘facts’ that get swept under the rug, and we
shall soon see examples of this.
 Observations of a possible stellar aberration had been appearing in print since at least the
1680s, but the validity of these observations remained inconclusive. After making the most
systematic and precise measurements to date on the matter, Bradley concluded that there was
indeed, unambiguously, a stellar aberration of 40 arc-minutes. It now fell to him to explain the
causes of this finding.
Assuming the Newtonian-mechanical model of light, Bradley then used the analogy of a
windless day with rain falling vertically from the sky: Instead of falling vertically as you are Commented [CK1]: I don’t know if Bradley used such an
travelling, rain instead tilts in your direction of travel. Two typical examples of this are that rain analogy. I used it as a pedagogical device.
seems to stream diagonally down a moving train's windows and that anyone holding an
umbrella must tilt it forward to protect them from the rain when moving swiftly.
Bradley concluded that the Earth's velocity around the Sun was to blame for the aberration
in the star's location, which appears to shift in the direction of motion of the Earth. The direction
in which the Earth is moving varies continuously as it revolves around the sun, which also
causes the star's displacement from its average position to vary continuously.
The finding was remarkable in that it not only explained aberration, but seemed to
demonstrate conclusively that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Going further still, Bradley
was able to calculate the speed of light thanks to the logic of his theory: From his computations,
he was able to estimate c at 3.01*108m/s. 8

3. 1800s – The debate reemerges, and wave theory comes out on top

i. Thomas Young’s Double Slit Experiment

This century opens as a continuation of the last, with Newtonian adherents of the
corpuscular theory now well established in the main scientific academies of Europe.
Enter Thomas Young: Doctor, physicist, musicologist, linguist – among the last great
polymaths of the modern period.
Young starts off a good Newtonian, like his contemporaries, but his research leads him to
the now legendary double-slit experiment. His own description of the experiment is as follows:
Young positions a small looking glass outside the window shutter such that it refracts the
sun's light onto the wall across from him, producing a cone of diverging light. He holds up a slip
of card about one-thirtieth of an inch across into the sunlight, and observes its shadow appear
on the wall, or on other cards that he holds up at various distances. On these he sees a pattern of
light and dark bands that he recognizes as an interference pattern caused by waves.
Further confirmation comes when he blocks the half of the light coming from one or
another edge of the slip of card, i.e. when one wavefront is stopped while the other is let
through. In this case, the pattern of light and dark bands disappears — a behaviour that can only
occur if the two halves of light were interfering.

8
American Physical Society
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201007/physicshistory.cfm#:~:text=In%201728%2C%20a
n%20English%20physicist,The%20measurements%20were%20getting%20better.
 So, the story goes, he performs his famous double slit experiment in 1803, he sees
diffraction bands, sees light interfering exactly the way that the superposition property of waves
would predict, he published his findings, and by the force of evidence wave theory triumphs in
Europe!
Here we might point out a tension between science history and science education aimed at a
general audience: Few, if any, historical resources one finds online give this account of Young’s
impact; the myth of the ‘Double Slit’ experiment is mostly perpetuated by science education
sources that simply state it as the definitive proof of the wave-nature of light, and leave us to
imagine this was ipso facto self-evident from the moment the experiment was performed.
We know that in reality the experiment failed to convert many or most of Young’s
contemporaries. The quote from Henry Brougham provides a poignant example:

“[This] can have no other efect than to check the progress of science
and renew all those wild phantoms of the imagination which Newton
put to flight from her temple.”

In other words, “This is crackpottery.”

So now a different, maybe equally simplistic spin on the story is that the lone maverick, the
rogue free-thinker – Young – is shunned by the mainstream establishment, like the Romantic
ideal of the artist too avant-garde to be appreciated in his own time. What might Feyerabend
have to say about this sort of heroism? It’s tricky; Feyerabend abhors institutional rigidity and
chauvinistic arrogance in more or less equal parts. So on the one hand, the quote from
Brougham is a textbook example of what Feyerabend refers to as the ‘Consistency Condition,’
which he defines as follows:

“The consistency condition, which demands that new hypotheses agree

with accepted theories, is unreasonable because it preserves the older
theory, and not the better theory. [..]

It eliminates a theory or a hypothesis not because it disagrees with the

facts; it eliminates it because it disagrees with another theory, with a
theory, moreover, whose confirming instances it shares. [...] Had the
younger theory been there first, then the consistency condition would
have worked in its favour. 'The first adequate theory has the right of
priority over equally adequate aftercomers.' ”

This much seems like, ‘point for Young, loss for Brougham and the establishment.’
But at the same time, Feyerabend might admonish us to be wary of lionizing Young, for all
the reasons involving ‘hindsight bias’ discussed previously.
Here it is possible even that linguistic biases come into play: Young’s experiment bears the
same name as the later, quantum-mechanical ‘extension’ of his experiment. That alone might
tempt us to say, ‘How incredibly ahead of its time!’ And surely it is one of the great experiments
in all of physics.
But just to push back a bit against so much myth-making, we would underline that the
initial experiment Young described wasn’t a ‘double slit’ experiment at all. Many online sources
omit this detail in their account, but in the original paper which we consulted, he describes a slip
of card being held edgewise in front of a pinhole aperture. There are still diffraction bands
observed, but no slits are used. Some secondary sources are more specific in stating that later, in
an 1807 compilation of lectures for the Royal Society, he provides a note suggesting the double
slit modification to the original experiment. But we were not able to locate this note in the 1807
publication, even having searched for many related terms to the words ‘double slit’ – and we
didn’t find a single secondary source that actually cited his mention of the double slit,
specifically.
Furthermore, the experiment didn’t describe wholly new phenomena – diffraction fringes
had already been observed by Grimaldi, and in Young’s 1803 paper he himself acknowledges
Grimaldi’s huge influence.
So without wishing to belabor the point about retroactive bias, all of the foregoing is a note
on the ‘false synthesis’ that often gets made of science history, where a-posteriori, sanitized,
modernized versions of theories or of experiments get retroactively attributed to their authors,
in order to make the sequence of events more intelligible to us in the present.
Feyerabend is a great enemy of this, because this imagined version of events misconstrues
science; it paints a picture of a clean methodology, and a linear process, when, in reality, the
process is largely shaped by features such as those we have seen: irrational stubbornness,
intransigence, personal passions, the weird, idiosyncratic fixations of loners (like perhaps
Young), idol-worshipping, tribalism, and unprofessional attacks on colleagues, and so on.
Here’s another great quote from Brougham. Speaking of Young’s undulation theory, he says:

"[It is] absurdity and one of the most incomprehensible suppositions

that we remember to have met with in the history of human
hypothesis.”

These are… fighting words. Feyerabend very much urges us to take note of these dramas
and personalities in the story. It might seem obvious today, but his thesis is very much that
science is a human enterprise, a cultural exercise, totally subject to our base, emotional nature
and our uncountable biases.
So unfortunately for Young, the corpuscular theory would not be so easily overturned. Too
much was at stake, too many careers had already been built on further elaborating and refining
the Newtonian theory of light. The wave theory represented an attack on the very foundations of
this edifice, built on so much sweat and so many tears.

ii. Wave theory gains ground – the ‘Fresnel-Arago-Poisson Spot’

The next most subtle version of the story says that another young gentleman, Augustin-Jean
Fresnel, shows up, and in 1819, submits a paper to a competition held by the French Academy of
Sciences, in which he gives a very complete, mathematical model of undulation theory, building
on Huygens’ work.
Simeon Poisson, a prominent member of the Academy – though apparently impressed with
Fresnel – points out a key paradox: According to Fresnel’s theory, there should be a bright spot
in the center of a circular shadow, which is of course absurd. Fresnel’s mentor Francois Arago,
also a member of the Academy, steps in to mediate, proposing the paradox be put to experiment.
And as we all know, the famous ‘Poisson Spot’ turns out to exist.
So now, finally, Young is vindicated, Fresnel is a hero, the Newtonians have to admit that
this is pretty spectacular, and the rest is history! And we have to admit that this is a pretty
spectacular case of theory being so well-derived from observation that it then, itself, expands the
domain of facts by its predictive power – inviting new facts against which to be falsified or
proven true.
Right…?
Well, how would such a Popperian analysis account for the fact that the famous ‘Poisson
Spot’ had already been described more than a century ago, by Joseph-Nicholas Delisle and
Giacomo Filippo Maraldi, in 1715 and 1723 respectively? The Feyerabendian reply is as follows:

“[Methodologists] may sermonize how important it is to consider all

the relevant evidence, and never mention those big and drastic facts
which show that the theories they admire and accept may be as badly
of as the older theories which they reject.”

“Facts and theories are much more intimately connected than is

admitted [...] there exist facts which cannot be unearthed except with
the help of alternatives to the theory to be tested, and which become
unavailable as soon as such alternatives are excluded. [...] The 'facts'
that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain way and are,
therefore, essentially ideational.”

Quite simply, no one knew what to make of this observation when it was first made, and as
such, little effort was likely made to fit it into the existing theories. At any rate by the time of
Poisson and Fresnel, Delisle and Maraldi’s observations had apparently been forgotten.
The episode corroborates Feyerabend’s view that science is not “the asymmetric judgement
of theories by so-called ‘facts’” – as much as this is what capital ‘m’ Methodologists might want
to believe. In their telling, good scientists are all along keeping track of the whole body of known
observations, and are constantly checking their theories against all the facts available, then
choosing to back the theories that agree with the greatest number of facts.
The Poisson Spot is a nice example of a ‘fact’ that was lying in plain sight, but that nobody
cared to engage with for a century because it failed to lend itself to easy interpretation from
within the paradigmatic theory.

And, just to hammer this in further, we’ll turn here very briefly to an even more spectacular
example from the 1600s that Feyerabend recounts in his book (which is tangentially also
relevant to our discussion of light).
The anecdote is that Galileo, after building the world’s first refracting telescope, tours the
thing around Rome to all the wealthy patrons of science and all the other learned men, all of
whom are in absolute awe of his invention: Incredible accounts are given, of being able to see
across the seven hills of Rome all the way into the home of a friend, even to be able to
distinguish what he is having for dinner. In fact at least one of these early witnesses urges that
the invention be kept secret for its utility as an instrument of war, because of the obvious
advantages it would provide for reconnaissance.
And then, when Galileo points the thing at the night sky, and shows his colleagues the
craters of the moon and the first ever magnified views of Venus and Mars, almost to a man, they
tell him: No.
It’s just a trick of the light, the thing’s messing with our vision, Galileo, you can’t expect the
way this thing interacts with light on earth to apply to light coming from the heavens, these
are completely different domains with different physical laws that apply – what we’re seeing,
it’s… who knows, it’s an illusion of some kind. It’s interesting, but your telescope doesn’t really
work in this context.
 We’re paraphrasing here, of course, but not by much – Feyerabend supplies several direct
quotations of Galileo’s 17th century contemporaries saying effectively the same, and this was
apparently enough the consensus among early witnesses to his telescope that Galileo was much
depressed by the episode.

So where were we?

The Poisson Spot is observed against all expectations, and the wave theory finally triumphs
over the particle theory of the Newtonians. Happily ever after.
Except that, even after having his totally counterintuitive, ‘absurd’ spot being
experimentally proven – a spot we now name after him – Simeon Poisson refused to believe in
the wave theory of light! He could not abandon Newtonian corpuscular theory, and apparently
neither could many of his colleagues at the Academy of Sciences.
So the overall balance of power was not as disturbed as the more ‘Cliff’s Notes’ versions of
this history would have us believe. Things were refusing to budge. This is a yet more flagrant
example of Feyerabend’s ‘consistency principle,’ or what you might as well call ‘reactionary
orthodoxy’ – just how married were these guys to their established theories that they couldn’t
be swayed by seeing light in the center of a shadow!

iii. Wave theory enthroned – Fizeau’s and Foucault’s measurements of c

The expedited account we’ll give of the rest of the story is as follows.
Once again Arago stepped in to propose that an experiment settle the debate, this time
dealing not with diffraction, but with refraction – of which both theories gave clear accounts, but
with differing predictions: The corpuscular account required that light speed up in optically
denser media, going all the way back to Newton; wave theory required light to slow down, going
back to Huygens. No accurate enough measurement of the speed of light had ever been made to
be able to test this.
In 1849, Fizeau’s measurement of the speed of light over an 8 kilometre distance from the
top of Montmartre produced unprecedentedly accurate measurements. This subsequently
allowed Leon Foucault, by vastly reducing the size of the experimental setup to a 1 metre
distance, to measure the speed of light in water.
The result? Light definitively moved slower in water than in air.
And now, finally, in earnest, after more than two centuries, wave theory carried the day.
Later in the century, James Clerk Maxwell’s theoretical derivations on the speed of
electromagnetic waves would match the measured speed of light in vacuum almost exactly,
further cementing the triumph of wave theory. And so, by the end of the 19th century, the battle
was well and truly over.

Or, was it…?

There was still that little issue of stellar aberration, going back to James Bradley, that
required some tweaking of the wave theory – in particular of the ether theory – in order to work.
But this part of the history we leave for a ‘sequel.’ 9 As a teaser we close this section with some of
the ideas from Feyerabend that will most shine a light on the ‘conclusion’ of the wave-particle
debate:

“No single theory ever agrees with all the known facts in its domain.”

9
PHYS 206, Group Assignment 3.
 “Numerical disagreements abound in science. They give rise to an
'ocean of anomalies' that surrounds every single theory.”

“We find that theories fail adequately to reproduce certain quantitative

results, and that they are qualitatively incompetent to a surprising
degree.”

4. Conclusion

To recap, a great many of Feyerabend’s ideas seem to find strong corroboration in the
history we’ve outlined – to an extent that surprised even us… Feyerabend’s philosophy is so
steeped in his own special brew of postmodern humanism – and this is so charismatic and
attractive an aspect of his writing – that there is a kind of tacit doubt it engenders: Is this all a
bit too good to be true? Is this science as we, good humanists and contrarians, wish it to be, not
as it is?
But the case study, if one strains to confront it honestly, resisting the temptation to be
reductive, simple, or ‘neat,’ is shot through with Feyerabendian scleroses.
We have seen clear examples of, variously: ‘ad hoc hypotheses,’ wild leaps of logic,
wholesale invention; institutional rigidity, status-quo chauvinism, inflexible, emotional,
inflamed passions, tantrums; orphaned ‘facts’ collecting dust on the shelves of history, for lack
of a theory to make them whole; sociological, physiological, linguistic, and formal impurities
impinging on what was supposed to be a strictly ‘empirical’ process – whatever that might even
mean.
Indeed, the messiness, complexity, and inscrutability of the real picture, inasmuch as it
validates Feyerabend, makes the reaction to him among his contemporaries all the more
understandable: It is exhausting trying to hold in one’s head such a frustratingly incomplete
picture of the truth.
We here underline one final concept of Feyerabend’s that seems clearly elucidated in the
wave-particle debate – in fact the idea that most clearly stands out when considering the whole:
While the story is littered with what Feyerabend tells us hampers the progress of science, it
also provides a maybe singularly protracted, sustained example of what Feyerabend most
strongly advocates for, which is a pluralism of scientific theories.
To be clear, this wasn’t a deliberate, self-conscious pluralism on the part of any of the big
names involved, so far as we can tell. None of the sources tell us that any of the scientists
mentioned were advocating for a simultaneous accommodation of both views…
But both views nonetheless survived, for centuries, and in doing so refined one another,
forcing one another to improve. The whole story is one of alternating offense and defense that
allowed each theory to check the other’s blind spots, to unearth the possibilities that the other
would have failed completely to seize upon. Feyerabend gives us the following:
 “No idea is ever examined in all its ramifications and no view is ever
given all the chances it deserves. Theories are abandoned and
superseded by more fashionable accounts long before they have had an
opportunity to show their virtues.”

“A scientist who is interested in maximal empirical content, and who

wants to understand as many aspects of his theory as possible, will
adopt a pluralistic methodology, he will compare theories with other
theories [..] and he will try to improve rather than discard the views
that appear to lose in the competition.”

Well, even if it is difficult to find a single actor in the story who fully lives up to this lofty
maxim, we could say that the ‘invisible hand’ of the scientific enterprise did just this.

We’re told a more robust picture yet – a theory subtler, stranger, vastly more radical than
either of these, and yet very much informed by aspects of both – would emerge in the early years
of the 20th century.
But the end of the debate isn’t our present interest, anyway. So we resist the temptation to
conclude with appeals to a ‘reconciliation’ between the two views, or any kind of ‘duality,’
because these terms can be misleading, and because anyway this would be too tidy a picture of
things, and Paul wouldn’t like that.

An exceptional essay 20/20

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