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Modern ophthalmic lens making machine. Optics began with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, followed by theories on light and vision developed by ancient Greek philosophers, and the development of geometrical optics in the Greco-Roman world.
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]
Wave optics was successfully unified with electromagnetic theory by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. [28] The next development in optical theory came in 1899 when Max Planck correctly modelled blackbody radiation by assuming that the exchange of energy between light and matter only occurred in discrete amounts he called quanta. [29]
1864 – James Clerk Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field; 1865 – James Clerk Maxwell publishes his landmark paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, in which Maxwell's equations demonstrated that electric and magnetic forces are two complementary aspects of electromagnetism.
This theory came to dominate the conceptions of light in the eighteenth century, displacing the previously prominent vibration theories, where light was viewed as "pressure" of the medium between the source and the receiver, first championed by René Descartes, and later in a more refined form by Christiaan Huygens. [1]
Pages in category "History of optics" The following 12 pages are in this category, out of 12 total. ... Emission theory (vision) H. A History of the Theories of ...
R. Meibauer, "Theory of rectilinear systems of light rays" M. Pasch, "On the focal surfaces of ray systems and the singularity surfaces of complexes" A. Levistal, "Research in geometrical optics" F. Klein, "On the Bruns eikonal" R. Dontot, "On integral invariants and some points of geometrical optics" T. de Donder, "On the integral invariants ...
Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel showed that the wave theory Christiaan Huygens described in his Treatise on Light (1690) could prove that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Science also slowly came to recognize the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics.