Corpuscular theory of light and Double slit experiment

Question

Physicists would initially have attempted to explain Young's double slit experiment's results using the concept of light as a stream of particles, ryt? Can somebody tell me what these attempts were and how they failed?

Answer 1

Every phenomenon has a level of interpretation. The photoelectric effect, Planck's law of Black body radiation, the emission of photons from excited electrons, all these phenomena are interpreted as light to consist of quanta, later called photons. Only the quantized deflection of EM radiation on edges and colors in thin films were not explainable in Young’s time. Wikipedia states:

... diffraction effects at edges or in narrow apertures, colours in thin films and insect wings, and the apparent failure of light particles to crash into one another when two light beams crossed, could not be adequately explained by the corpuscular theory ...

So the emission as well as the absorption of EM radiation is explained by photons. The deflection of EM radiation withe a swelling intensity distribution behind edges and the deflection in transparent media (lenses for example) are interpreted as coming from the wave characteristics of light in analogy to water waves:

But such an interpretation has some weaknesses:

1. Comparing the both sketches you should agree that in the upper sketch of water waves the drawn points of minimum intensity C and D are moving “upwards” an E and F are moving “downwards”. This is not the case for the intensity distribution of EMR behind slits. How Young could not point this out? The analogy is missing an important point.
2. An intensity distribution from single emitted photons occurs after a while even behind single edges. The explanation of a path difference from a coherent light source is obsolet in this experiment.

what these attempts were and how they failed?

Do these last phenomena failed the corpuscular nature of light? I think non. Simply in Young’s time where was no knowledge about the quantized interaction between EMR and the surface electrons from edges and transparent media as well as from crystal lattices.

Anyway, these different interpretations don’t change anything in everyday life except less mystery of the double slit experiment. Ernst Abbe made the right calculations for lenses based on observations, not care about a wave or corpuscular behavior of light.