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Optics was significantly reformed by the developments in the medieval Islamic world, such as the beginnings of physical and physiological optics, and then significantly advanced in early modern Europe, where diffractive optics began. These earlier studies on optics are now known as "classical optics".
1st century AD – Pliny in his Natural History records the story of a shepherd Magnes who discovered the magnetic properties of some iron stones, "it is said, made this discovery, when, upon taking his herds to pasture, he found that the nails of his shoes and the iron ferrel of his staff adhered to the ground".
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. [1] Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light.
Pages in category "History of optics" The following 12 pages are in this category, out of 12 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. ...
2nd century AD — Ptolemy (in his work Optics) wrote about the properties of light including: reflection, refraction, and colour. 984 — Ibn Sahl completes a treatise On Burning Mirrors and Lenses, describing plano-convex and biconvex lenses, and parabolic and ellipsoidal mirrors.
Because Optics contributed a new dimension to the study of vision, it influenced later scientists. In particular, Ptolemy used Euclid's mathematical treatment of vision and his idea of a visual cone in combination with physical theories in Ptolemy's Optics, which has been called "one of the most important works on optics written before Newton". [3]
Some argued that Euclid's version of emission theory was purely metaphorical, highlighting mainly the geometrical relations between eyes and objects. The geometry of classical optics is equivalent no matter which direction light is considered to move because light is modeled by its path, not as a moving object. However, his theory of clarity of ...
2005 – First light at SALT, the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, with a hexagonal primary mirror of 11.1 by 9.8 meters. 2007 – First light at Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC) , in Spain, the largest optical telescope in the world with an effective diameter of 10.4 meters.