corpusculaire

Corpusculaire is a French adjective meaning relating to corpuscles or small particles. It is used in scientific contexts to describe theories, models, or phenomena that treat matter, light, or other systems as composed of discrete bodies. The root comes from the Latin corpusculum, “a small body.”

In the history of science, the term is most closely associated with the corpuscular theory of light, proposed in the 17th century by Isaac Newton and others. This view held that light consists of tiny particles, or corpuscles, emitted by luminous bodies. It competed with wave theories and with experiments demonstrating interference and diffraction. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, the development of quantum theory reconciled particle and wave descriptions, with light described in terms of quanta or photons in quantum electrodynamics, a perspective that retains a corpuscular heritage in its particle-like aspects.

Beyond optics, “corpusculaire” has been used to describe particle-based descriptions of matter (mécanique corpusculaire) and other domains where discrete units are treated as individual bodies. In biology and medicine, older usage sometimes referred to small cellular bodies or granules, though modern terminology generally uses more precise terms. In contemporary French scientific language, corpusculaire is primarily encountered in historical contexts or when referring to particle-based interpretations.