Hobbes und das Sinusgesetz der Refraktion

Abstract

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the sine law of refraction had been discovered. Thus, natural philosophers tried even more to find a cause of refraction and to demonstrate the law. One of them was Thomas Hobbes, who was the author of the Leviathan and also worked on optics. At first, in the Hobbes analogy (1634), he was influenced by Ibn al-Haytham, just as Descartes was in his famous proof in the Dioptrique (1637). In his later optical scripts Tractatus Opticus I (published 1644), Tractatus Opticus II (probably 1640), and A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (1646), he developed a new explanation. Rejecting a corpuscular theory of light, Hobbes conceived a ray not as a body but as a motion originating from the light source: a ray can only be the motion of a body. The normal to the sides of a ray is called 'linea lucis'. If a ray is incident into another medium with a different density, one part of the linea lucis will be in the rarer and the other in the denser medium during an imperceptibly short period. Because the resistances in the two media are different, the parts of the linea lucis will move with different velocities; as a result the linea lucis will rotate and the direction of the ray will be changed. The next explanation given in De Corpore (1655) comes closer to the first one that Hobbes set down in the analogy. It must be asked why he replaced the theory of rotation by one which seems to carry less conviction. The reason could be that the dropped theory is founded in part on basic requirements of a corpuscular theory of light. Abandoning the whole theory might have been the lesser evil for Hobbes. In two later works, the Problemata Physica (1662) and the Decameron Physiologicum (1678), Hobbes varied his explanation without giving any proof for the sine law. It should be noted, however, that in the Decameron he refers to the proof contained in the Tractatus Opticus I, but not that given in De Corpore.