The Fire within the Eye
Light, like the air we breathe, is one of those invisible qualities that most of us only think about when the power goes off and there are no batteries in the flashlight. But ask yourself just what itis, and suddenly light becomes a puzzle indeed. Is light athing? Is it, as Aristotle claimed, an accident? Physicist David Park covers all the bases inThe Fire Within the Eye, his fascinating exploration of the history of light. All the heavy-hitters show up here--Aristotle, Galileo, Archimedes, and Max Planck--but there are also plenty of names the average reader might not recognize, such as the 10th-century Iraqi Abu Ali al-Hasan, who suggested that the objects we see are tiny reproductions of the real thing imprinted on the lenses of our eyes.Park takes the reader from the earliest theories of Aristotle (light is an accident) to the most recent hypotheses (light is like both a wave and a particle), and he does it in prose that is highly readable. If by the end ofThe Fire Within the Eyeyou still don't understand exactly what light is, don't worry: David Park is less interested in defining it than in describing how our perceptions of it have changed over the millennia.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.