Abstract
SUMMARY. — The only hypothesis that can account for the qualitative aspect of the refraction of light as it passes from one medium to another, within the framework of the corpuscular model of light, is the hypothesis of the attraction of the luminous corpuscle by the densest media. The next step is to find a corresponding quantitative law for the refraction — that is, Descartes' laws. In fact, this is just what Newton did in his Principia, when he calculated the ratio of the sines of the angles of incidence and reflection according to the moduli of the speeds in each of the media he considered and showed that, in the case of his model, this ratio is independent of the angle of incidence. This conclusion drawn from Newton's model agreed with the experimental result. This result was then confirmed by numerous successors, and it is not the result itself that I question here. But the particular process that Newton used in his demonstration, which was never re-examined or repeated by anyone afterwards, is based on an implicit hypothesis that I examine in this article in detail.
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