The Fire within the Eye

This book is very good, but I am more interested in the scientific than in the artistic aspects of the conception of light. It is a personal preference, and other person could have the reverse one. I found some mistakes. For example, the author says that a blue light combined with a yellow one give a green light and that is not true. But the book is still good. I prefer "Catching the light" a lot, but I do not regret have read this interesting book.

The subtitle of Prof. Park's book is "A historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light." That promise is faithfully kept in a thorough, erudite, and entertaining narrative. Park, a physicist, seems equally at home as historian, philosopher and classicist. Paying meticulous attention to the nuances of thought and language, he traces mankind's twenty-five century struggle to understand the phenomena of light and vision, beginning with Empedocles in Greek antiquity and ending in the quantum-mechanical era of Planck, Einstein and Bohr.With scholarly patience, Park dissects and illuminates the struggles of early investigators to get a grip on the baffling mysteries of light and its interaction with the human eye. This often requires the author to pick bits of sense out of mounds of nonsense. He points out, for example, that even the wildly mistaken hypothesis of visual rays emanating from the eye led to some correct conclusions about geometric optics. Park also underscores the fact that taking the next step puts even the most accomplished scientists at risk. For example, Newton's particle interpretation of light incorrectly called for an increase of speed on passing from air to a denser material and (due to his influence and prestige) delayed acceptance of the wave interpretation pioneered by Huygens and conclusively demonstrated by Young. In an ironic twist, particles of light returned with a vengeance as thoroughly modern quantized photons.Aside from some minor errors and omissions in figures, the only factual problems I encountered came on page 165, where convergence point P in Figure 6.5 is incorrectly called the focal point of the lens (this would be true only for incoming rays parallel with the optical axis), and the inverted real aerial image formed by the lens is misidentified as a virtual image. Perhaps the most distinctive quality of "The Fire Within the Eye" is Park's astute and encyclopedic grasp of historical context. One senses that he is telling only a fraction of what he knows about the lives and times of the philosophers and scientists who populate the book.

A must read for everyone interested in Light. It explains everything - dual nature of light, polarization, diffraction, interference, colours, light as vibration of the fifth dimension, etc. Is useful both for the layman and the expert reader. The book's simplicity is its biggest advantage. From simplicity arises elegance.