The following is an excerpt from the chapter:

The 17th century brought two conflicting theories of light. The first, from Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, was that light traveled through the ether in waves, like ripples on a pond. The second, from English scientist Isaac Newton, held light to be corpuscular, having some mass. Both agreed that luminous objects radiated light, which, on contact with the retina, stimulated a nerve in the eye to produce vision, which wasn’t far from the truth. Newton, regarded by many as the greatest scientist ever, won the day. His masterpiece, Principia, reduced the universe to a god-less machine and reinforced the Scientific Method, yet he too was wrong about light.