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elou
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- TL;DR Summary
- In his famous double slit experiment Young claims that blocking one side makes the fringes disappear. I tried it with a single and a double slit, and I could block the fringes on one side one for one, while the fringes on the other side remained visible.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1804.0001 is the Bakerian lecture held in 1803 where Young talks of his double slit experiment. It is in fact a single paragraph in a much longer article. His article of 1801, which is often cited as the article in which said experiment is presented, is in fact a manifest in favor of the wave theory of light, and where no word is spoken of the double slit experiment.
Instead of slits, Young uses a card that cuts the beam in two halves. He claims that when he pushes a second card towards one of the sides of the center card, the fringes disappear on both sides. My own experience contradicts this claim, and I wonder if other people have tried it with similar or different results.
When the screen is far enough from the slit, the dark and bright fringes are clearly visible, and each fringe can consecutively be blocked by an obstacle put on the path of the beam, with no effect whatsoever on the remaining fringes on both sides.
edit:
the pattern is I think not that large. Closer to 10cm
Instead of slits, Young uses a card that cuts the beam in two halves. He claims that when he pushes a second card towards one of the sides of the center card, the fringes disappear on both sides. My own experience contradicts this claim, and I wonder if other people have tried it with similar or different results.
When the screen is far enough from the slit, the dark and bright fringes are clearly visible, and each fringe can consecutively be blocked by an obstacle put on the path of the beam, with no effect whatsoever on the remaining fringes on both sides.
edit:
the pattern is I think not that large. Closer to 10cm
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