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VI.—On the Colours of Thin Plates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Lord Rayleigh
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Extract

The first impression upon the mind of the reader of the above title will probably be, that the subject has long since been exhausted. The explanation of these colours, as due to interference, was one of the first triumphs of the wave-theory of light; and what Young left undone was completed by Poisson, Fresnel, Arago, and Stokes. And yet it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that the colours of thin plates have never been explained at all. The theory set forth so completely in our treatises tells us indeed how the composition of the light reflected depends upon the thickness of the plate, but what will be its colour cannot, in most cases, be foretold without information of an entirely different kind, dealing with the chromatic relations of the spectral colours themselves.

Type
Transactions
Information
Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , May 1887 , pp. 157 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1887

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References

page 159 note * Airy's Tract on Optics, § 79.

page 159 note † “On the Theory of Compound Colours,” Phil. Trans., 1860.

page 160 note * It is understood that K represents Mrs Maxwell. In these matters a woman's observations are generally to be preferred to a man's, as less liable to irregularities of the kind described in Nature, Nov. 17, 1881.

page 165 note * See several papers by the Author, published in the Philosophical Magazine, “On the Light from the Sky, its Polarisation and Colour,” Feb. 1871, April 1871; “On the Scattering of Light by small Particles,” June 1871; “On the Electro-Magnetic Theory of Light,” August 1881, &c.

page 165 note † The points 20, 24, 28, …. on the diagram, represent the spectrum colours as determined by Maxwell.

page 167 note * Newton's, Opticks, 1704, book ii. p. 21 Google Scholar.

page 169 note * “On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Liquid Films, with a Revision of Newton's Table of Colours,” Phil. Trans., 1881.

page 169 note † In comparing with Table III., it should be remembered that the numbers there given under the head of V = 0 are relative only, the true values being infinitely small.