Pierre-Simon Laplace
Optics

Laplace was a supporter of the corpuscle theory of light of Newton. In the fourth edition of Mécanique Céleste, Laplace assumed that short-ranged molecular forces were responsible for refraction of the corpuscles of light. Laplace and Étienne-Louis Malus also showed that Huygens principle of double refraction could be recovered from the principle of least action on light particles.

However in 1815, Augustin-Jean Fresnel presented a new a wave theory for diffraction to a commission of the French Academy with the help of François Arago. Laplace was one of the commission members and they ultimately awarded a prize to Fresnel for his new approach.
length_constraints:number_words[413], language:response_language[Polish]