Drawbacks of Newton’s corpuscular theory:

i. It could not explain partial reflection and refraction at the surface of a transparent medium.

ii. It was unable to explain phenomenon such as interference, diffraction, polarisation etc.

iii. This theory predicted that speed of light in a denser medium is more than the speed of light in a rarer medium which was experimentally proved wrong by Focault. Hence Newton’s corpuscular theory was rejected.

iv. When particles are emitted from the source of light, the mass of the source of light must decrease but several experiments showed that there is no change in the mass of the source of light.

because density and temperature of isotropic medium are same throughout.

iii. Different colours of light waves are due to different wavelengths of light waves: Each wave has its own wavelength. As the wavelength changes, its colour and frequency also changes. This is indicated by change in the colour.

iv. The material medium is necessary for the propagation of wave: Periodic disturbance is created in the medium at one place which is propagated from that place to another place. The medium only carries disturbance and hand it over to the next particle. To explain the propagation of light waves through vacuum, Huygens suggested the existence of a hypothetical medium called ‘luminiferous ether’.

Note: Light waves are assumed to be transverse whose speed in a hypothetical medium is given by v = \(\sqrt{\cfrac{E}{\rho}}\), where E and ρ are elasticity and density of the medium respectively.