Talk:Young's interference experiment

Physics B‑class Mid‑importance

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The title of this article shows it is about the piece of equipment called Young's interferometer. The famous experiment performed by Young is covered by another article called Double-slit experiment.
So far, this article appears to be focussing on Young's experiment rather than his equipment. That puts this article at risk of being re-directed to, or merged with, Double-slit experiment, or even deleted. To successfully withstand a challenge, this article needs to focus much more on Young's interferometer, and much less on his double-slit experiment. Dolphin (t) 05:22, 2 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Double slit article is primarily a discusssion of the problems that inteference appears to cause in quantum mechanics when you start thinking about light as particles, or electrons as waves, and only mentions Young's experiment in passing. Someone is currently working on a major revision which makes this clearer - see the discussion. In my view, it should be re-named 'Double-slit interference (quantum mechanics)', but making such suggestions seems to tread on a lot of toes, so I would prefer to avoid doing so at the moment.

This article is about the historical context of Young's experiment - the fact that Young showed that you get interference effects with light just as you do with water waves, thereby demonstrating that Newtons particle theory of light must be wrong, which I beleive merits an article of its own.

I am currently developing a general article about diffraction which will include an analysis of the classical optics explanation of double slit interference which should link well into both articles

Perhaps I will re-name it as 'Young's interference experiment' since the double slit bit is not of particular importance.Epzcaw (talk) 17:36, 2 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]