The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light

Light is a curious phenomenon. Is it a particle or a wave or both? How does it travel? How do our eyes and brain interpret the images light conveys? These are important questions that other authors have tackled and answered elsewhere. But how did we arrive at our present understanding of light? This is not so easy to answer because the phenomenon of light has been misunderstood for so long. Parks, professor emeritus of physics at Williams College and recipient of two Phi Beta Kappa's Science Book awards (for The Image of Eternity and The How and the Why) offers an answer in this panoramic study of our understanding of light. The historical sweep of Park's examination is vast; his cast of characters ranges from the pre-Socratics through the medieval scientists (European and Arab) to the giants of modern physics. There is mercifully little mathematics beyond a few well-worn geometric diagrams demonstrating light's more obvious characteristics when reflected in a mirror or passed through water or glass. More difficult is the occasionally tedious recapitulation of the more hopeless treatments of light. Parks is quite explicit about the fact that his work is not a story of uninterrupted scientific progress. Dead ends are as important as breakthroughs. But when one medieval scientist's dead end is little more than his repetition of another's, you have to wonder if both impasses were really worth mentioning. Though already a fine work of science, this history of light, with a little trimming, could burn in a reader's mind a bit more brightly. (July)