Translations:Analogy/41/en
Galileo’s astronomical discoveries inspired the generations that followed. The study of light became paramount. In developing the theory of light, scientists constantly used analogies between light waves and mechanical waves or between light rays and streams of particles. René Descartes (1596–1650) described the functioning of the eye and presented a preliminary version of an enormously important scientific concept — the wave theory of light (Clark and Robinson, 1985[1]). Robert Hooke (1635–1703) formulated stress-strain relationships, which established the elastic behavior of solid bodies (Robinson and Clark, 1988b[2]). Hooke proposed that light is a vibratory displacement of the medium through which it propagates at finite speed. Thomas Young was the first to consider shear as an elastic strain. Augustus Jean Fresnel showed that if light were a transverse wave, then one could develop a theory accommodating the polarization of light. Green (1842) illustrated the power of using mathematical analogies in his treatment of elastic (material) waves and light waves.