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"Optics History."
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Measuring shadows : Kepler's optics of invisibility
In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler's Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler's radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler's ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions.
Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.
eBook
The adaptive optics revolution : a history
Duffner has compiled the history of the most revolutionary breakthrough in astronomy since Galileo pointed his telescope skyward--the technology that will greatly expand our understanding of the universe.
eBook
Ibn al-Haytham : the man who discovered how we see
Celebrated in a film featuring Omar Sharif in his final role, meet the scientist known as the \"Father of Optics,\" Ibn al-Haytham! During the golden age of science, knowledge, and invention in Muslim civilization -- also known as the \"Dark Ages\" in Western Europe -- this incredible scholar discovered how we see and set the stage for the methods we now know as the scientific process.
Book
A history of optics from Greek antiquity to the nineteenth century
This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light. It is a clear and richly illustrated synthesis of a large amount of literature, and a reliable and efficient guide for anyone who wishes to enter this domain.
eBook
Invisibility : the history and science of how not to be seen
\"Is it possible for something or someone to be made invisible? This question, which has intrigued authors of science fiction for over a century, has become a headline-grabbing topic of scientific research. In this book, science writer and optical physicist Gregory J. Gbur traces the science of invisibility from its sci-fi origins in the nineteenth-century writings of authors such as H. G. Wells and Fitz James O'Brien to modern stealth technology, invisibility cloaks, and metamaterials. He explores the history of invisibility and its science and technology connections, including the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum, the development of the atomic model, and quantum theory. He shows how invisibility has moved from fiction to reality, and he questions the hidden paths that lie ahead for researchers.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap
A collection of engaging essays that discusses odd and unusual topics in optics.
eBook
Evening News
Eileen Reeves examines a web of connections between journalism, optics, and astronomy in early modern Europe, devoting particular attention to the ways in which a long-standing association of reportage with covert surveillance and astrological prediction was altered by the near simultaneous emergence of weekly newsheets, the invention of the Dutch telescope, and the appearance of Galileo Galilei's astronomical treatise,The Starry Messenger.Early modern news writers and consumers often understood journalistic texts in terms of recent developments in optics and astronomy, Reeves demonstrates, even as many of the first discussions of telescopic phenomena such as planetary satellites, lunar craters, sunspots, and comets were conditioned by accounts of current events. She charts how the deployment of particular technologies of vision-the telescope and the camera obscura-were adapted to comply with evolving notions of objectivity, censorship, and civic awareness. Detailing the differences between various types of printed and manuscript news and the importance of regional, national, and religious distinctions,Evening Newsemphasizes the ways in which information moved between high and low genres and across geographical and confessional boundaries in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
eBook