LIGHT

TIMELINE
HARSHINI DINESHKUMAR
Euclid(300BCE)Reflection
- Euclid, based on his observations of light, made
predictions about light rays, stating that they are
straight lines.
- Light rays only fall on objects, and if they don't fall
on an object, we can't see it.
- Euclid, an ancient Greek mathematician,
introduced the law of reflection around 300 BCE.
- Light travels in straight lines and reflects from a
surface at the same angle it hit it.
- Euclid's Catoptrics1 (280BC), the earliest surviving optical treatise,
established that light travels in straight lines in homogeneous media.
- Euclid observed and utilized mathematical descriptions of shape and angles
to explain the behavior of light rays in his world.
SOURCE : https://www.ogdentrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Research-cards_ideas-about-
light.pdf
Ptolemy (135 AD) Refraction
- Ptolemy used light reflection from mirrors and refraction when
passing through transparent materials to support his theory that
vision results from ocular flow.
-Ptolemy studied the refraction of light as it passes between two
transparent mediums and its reflection on flat, spherical mirrors in
order to support his theory that vision results from a flow that
originates in the eye.
-Ptolemy researched light, color, refraction, and reflection in the
realm of optics.
-It was claimed that his research was among the first to
comprehend the principles of refraction, particularly how light
shifts in direction or style when it travels through various
materials.
SOURCE:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy
Al-Haytham (965)Light Is Reflected AND Not Produced By Eyes

-Ibn al-Haytham established the rules of refraction after conducting a

thorough investigation into how light travels through different
materials.
- He also conducted the first research on how light splits into its
individual colors.
-The most significant work by Ibn al-Haytham is Kitāb al-manāạir, or
"Optics."
-It contains the accurate model of vision, despite some influence from
Ptolemy's 2nd century AD Optics: light rays reflected from objects are passively received by
the eyes, not actively emitted from the eye.
-Later on, the name "camera obscura" was applied to the dark room.
-Ibn al-Haytham concentrated on producing significant advances in the study of light and
eyesight while he was in Egypt.
-Ibn al-Haytham conducted experiments with lenses and mirrors to study the motion of light.

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham
Newton(1666) White Light Contains All Visible Light
-Through his lens-making endeavors, he became aware of a chromatic
aberration issue.
- By refracting sunlight onto a wall, Newton found during his renowned
prism experiments that white light was composed of seven discernible
colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
-Isaac Newton proposed his theory of the corpuscular theory of light,
which holds that light is made up of tiny particles known as corpuscles.
-His principal finding was that the spectrum, or colors, of sunlight may
be dissolved.
-Light-related phenomena have long piqued Newton's interest, and
he sought to comprehend how light is reflected and refracted.
-He gave an example of how pure white light was made up of the
seven visible colors.
-Refracting light onto a piece of wood with a tiny hole drilled into it
was Newton's pivotal experiment.

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton
Huygens (1629)Light Travels In Waves
-However, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens developed a
method for visualizing wave propagation because he
thought that light was composed of waves that vibrated
up and down perpendicular to the direction of the wave.
-The 'Huygens' Principle' was later named after this.
-The photoelectric effect cannot be explained by Huygen's
wave theory of light.
-He demonstrated that all points of a wave front cause
partial waves, which in turn produce additional wave- motion, using the ether as

the medium for light wave propagation. As a result, light is not a substance
transfer but rather a "tendency to move."
-The diameter of the Earth's orbit may then be divided by the time difference to
determine the speed of light.
-The calculations were first performed by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens,
who discovered that the speed of light was equal to 131,000 miles per second.
-Huygens postulated that light propagated in waves via luminiferous ether, a rare
material, based on the third theory.
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens
James Maxwell (1831)Light Is Electromagnetic Waves
-The electromagnetic theory developed by James Clerk Maxwell, which demonstrated that
light was electromagnetic radiation, is what made him most renowned.
-Both Einstein's special relativity theory and quantum mechanics are said to have benefited
from his theory.
-The electromagnetic theory developed by 19th-century scientist James Clerk Maxwell is
his most well-known contribution.
-In summary, Maxwell found that there was an unbreakable relationship between the
domains of electricity, magnetism, and optics.
-All that visible light is, is an electromagnetic radiation that is detectable by the human eye.
-After publishing "A Dynamical Theory of the -
Electromagnetic Field" in 1865, Maxwell proved that
magnetic and electric fields move at the speed of light in
space as waves.
-Maxwell developed four significant mathematical
equations that defined these and other links between
electricity and magnetism after he observed
similarities between the speeds at which electromagnetic
waves and light travel.

SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell