Brno, Czech Republic

Wave and Partical Optics

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: physical science, environment
University website: www.muni.cz/
Years of study: 4
Optics
Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Because light is an electromagnetic wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves exhibit similar properties.
Optics
(Ptolemy) left in his Optics, the earliest surviving table of angles of refraction from air to water. ...This table, quoted and requoted until modern times, has been admired... A closer glance at it, however, suggests that there was less experimentation involved in it than originally was thought, for the values of the angles of refraction form an arithmetic progression of second order... As in other portions of Greek Science, confidence in mathematics was here greater than that in the evidence of the senses, although the value corresponding to 60° agrees remarkably well with experience.
Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959)
Optics
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
Claude Debussy, as quoted in Greatness : Who Makes History and Why by Dean Keith Simonton, p. 110
Optics
As men of inward light are wont
To turn their optics in upon't.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part III (1678), Canto I, line 481, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593
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