Abstract

According to Lakatos's theory of scientific change, the victory of the wave theory in the nineteenth-century optical revolution was due to its empirical successes. However, historical facts do not support this opinion. Based on Laudan's theory of scientific change, this paper presents a different orientation to reconstruct the optical revolution. By comparing the conceptual problems that both optical theories had, this paper argues that it was the inferior status of the corpuscular theory in dealing with conceptual problems that constituted the primary cause of the optical revolution.