Light Years and Time Travel: An Exploration of Mankind's Enduring Fascination with Light
"Extraordinary... Clegg?s accessible writing style manages to encapsulate the lives of light?s disciples with humorous and interesting anecdotes... Clegg also provides real scientific insight into how light behaves. He explains complex theories through lucid metaphors, without resorting to the elaborate diagrams so beloved of some popular science writers." (New Scientist)"This immensely likeable work of pop science traces "man's enduring fascination with light," from Aristotle's plans for a death ray (burning enemy ships with a giant array of mirrors) through to a recent experiment that seems to have sent Mozart's 40th Symphony faster than light, and thus back through time. Clegg is very good at explaining the bizarre properties of light..." (The Guardian U.K.)"It is rare to see a review of a non-reference book in these pages, but Brian Clegg's book is a treat to be savoured. We are familiar with names such as Snell, Faraday, Newton and Galileo, but Clegg tells us something of their lives and the paths by which they came to provide the foundations of the optical knowledge which is essential to our livelihood. He relates it with humour and originality. Amongst the collection of gems is an explanation of Fermat's Principle of Least Time. I admit to being less than fascinated when Ivan Wilson went through the proof in a lecture at City College but, at the time, no one had heard of Baywatch, and no one had refered to the concept as the Baywatch Principle, as Clegg does!The book follows the history of the efforts to comprehend the nature of light, from the Ancient Greeks to modern scientists such as Feynman and Nimtz. The future is considered too: the instant transportation of matter has now been achieved and the invention of 'slow' glass will allow us to display in our homes scenes captured from afar which emerge, over time, from the surface.The text is well pitched, being not too elementary to bore, yet interesting and thought provoking enough for those who have studied optics to a higher level. I recommend it highly." — Paula Stevens -Dispensing Optician (the magazine of the Association of British Dispensing Opticians)