Chapter 1 Our lives are profoundly influenced by light.
Light is fundamental to vision - perhaps the most important of all our senses.
Light from the sun warms the earth, and provides the energy for photosynthesis - the basis of life itself. Technological applications of light are changing our society through advances in communication, health care, industrial processes and scientific research. In this chapter, and the next, we will discuss these questions at a fairly fundamental level. We start our discussion on light in a very unlikely way - by looking at effects associated with electric charges. As we will see, however, these effects have a most extraordinary and unexpected relationship with light.