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 it is, and suddenly light becomes a puzzle indeed. Is light a thing? Is it, as Aristotle claimed, an accident? Physicist David Park covers all the bases in The 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 of The Fire Within the Eye you 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.