Jonti said:
Nope.
By the 1830s, most optics-oriented members of the scientific community recognized the power of the wave theory for explaining contemporary experiments; emissionists could boast no such success ... Decisive confirmation of the wave theory of light would wait until 1887/88
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/fresnel.html
But you're just exposing your ignorance, or else just being dishonest.
Because later, at the beginning of the 20th century, the particle theory of light was considered probably better.
"At the close of the 19th century, the case for atomic theory, that matter was made of particulate objects or atoms, was well established. Electricity, first thought to be a fluid, was understood to consist of particles called electrons, . In brief, it was understood that much of nature was made of particles. At the same time, waves were well understood, together with wave phenomena such as diffraction and interference. Light was believed to be a wave, as Thomas Young's double-slit experiment and effects such as Fraunhofer diffraction had clearly demonstrated the wave-like nature of light.
But as the 20th century turned, problems had emerged with this viewpoint. The photoelectric effect, as analyzed in 1905 by Albert Einstein, demonstrated that light also possessed particle-like properties. Later on, the diffraction of electrons would be predicted and experimentally confirmed, thus showing that electrons must have wave-like properties in addition to particle properties."
The thing is, though, this was in relation to whoever it was saying that it's been known for ages that light isn't made out of matter, - was that the end of materialism- ? apparently not. Should it have been? Not necessarily. Because what you're overlooking is that a wave is a much higher-level concept than a particle, it's a metaphor, or an analogy, like describing electricity as a fluid. Describing something as a wave tells you that it behaves like a wave, but it doesn't tell you what it's made out of. The thing about waves is that they require a medium to carry them.
Scientists knew about waves from studying them in water. It turns out that you can better understand the behaviour of liquids by modelling them as waves within a medium of particles, because the behaviour of the waves remain unaltered irrespective of which particles are actually doing what. Describing light as a wave tells you, it behaves -like that, but it tells you nothing about the medium through which the wave is propagated. And really, to fully understand the phenomenon, you need to know about the medium. The idea of waves that travel through no physical medium doesn't sound very materialist to me, and it doesn't sound very explanatory either.
So in a way, if you were a materialist and you believed light was a wave, you were looking for a medium in which the light waves could exist. Unless of course you think it's possible for waves to exist without any physical medium, which seems unlikely. -(In space, no-one can hear you scream-)
Then the problem becomes - If light is waves carried through a medium of particles, then what particles, they must be very small. But even the smallest particles people knew about then, - electrons were turning out to behave like waves in some respects, suggesting then that the electrons must be made out of far far smaller particles wthin which the wave that creates the appearance of a particle called an electron manifests.
And this rabbithole probably has no bottom. If you could get close enough to the particles that make up an electron, you'd probably find they were also waves within a still smaller medium.
Infinity goes both ways. Or at least - this is an idea that has proved impossible to falsify.
(quotes from wikipedia)
