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History of Optics (audio mp3) by Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Emily Winterburn, Curator of Astronomy at the National Maritime Museum (recorded by the BBC
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.
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".
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. ...
Objects resembling lenses date back 4000 years although it is unknown if they were used for their optical properties or just as decoration. [6] Greek accounts of the optical properties of water-filled spheres (5th century BC) were followed by many centuries of writings on optics, including Ptolemy (2nd century) in his Optics, who wrote about the properties of light including reflection ...
Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer (/ ˈ f r aʊ n ˌ h oʊ f ər /; German: [ˈfraʊnˌhoːfɐ]; 6 March 1787 – 7 June 1826 [1]) was a German physicist and optical lens manufacturer. He made optical glass, an achromatic telescope, and objective lenses.
The works of Athanasius Kircher (1646), Jan Marek Marci (1648), Robert Boyle (1664), and Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1665), predate Newton's optics experiments (1666–1672). [5] Newton published his experiments and theoretical explanations of dispersion of light in his Opticks. His experiments demonstrated that white light could be split up into ...
Geometrical optics, or ray optics, is a model of optics that describes light propagation in terms of rays. The ray in geometrical optics is an abstraction useful for approximating the paths along which light propagates under certain circumstances.