A HISTORY OF OPTICS

This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light. It shows how light gradually became the central entity of a domain of physics that no longer referred to the functioning of the eye/ it retraces the subsequent competition between medium-based and corpuscular concepts of light/ and it details the ninete enth-century flourishing of mechanical ether theories. The author critically exploits and sometimes completes the more specialized h istories ...[Read more]