Download or read book A Brief History of Light and Those That Lit the Way written by Richard J. Weiss and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1996 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Leonardo to Oppenheimer, from candles to lasers, from cave drawings to cinema, from Stonehenge to quantum mechanics, from Genesis to the Big Bang, light has filled our thoughts, our way of life, our aesthetics, our technology, and our means for survival. Richard Weiss leads us along these paths over the past 500 light years. The way is lit by pioneers such as Rembrandt, Einstein, D W Griffith, Newton, and Heisenberg." A Brief History Of Light, And Those That Lit The Way" is a summer''s day roller-coaster ride through five centuries of man''s achievements in understanding and manipulating light. Readership: General.
Download or read book A History of Light and Colour Measurement written by Sean F. Johnston and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2003 Paul Bunge Prize of the Hans R. Jenemann Foundation for the History of Scientific Instruments Judging the brightness and color of light has long been contentious. Alternately described as impossible and routine, it was beset by problems both technical and social. How trustworthy could such measurements be? Was the best standard of inten
Download or read book Optics in Our Time written by Mohammad D. Al-Amri and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-12 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Light and light based technologies have played an important role in transforming our lives via scientific contributions spanned over thousands of years. In this book we present a vast collection of articles on various aspects of light and its applications in the contemporary world at a popular or semi-popular level. These articles are written by the world authorities in their respective fields. This is therefore a rare volume where the world experts have come together to present the developments in this most important field of science in an almost pedagogical manner. This volume covers five aspects related to light. The first presents two articles, one on the history of the nature of light, and the other on the scientific achievements of Ibn-Haitham (Alhazen), who is broadly considered the father of modern optics. These are then followed by an article on ultrafast phenomena and the invisible world. The third part includes papers on specific sources of light, the discoveries of which have revolutionized optical technologies in our lifetime. They discuss the nature and the characteristics of lasers, Solid-state lighting based on the Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology, and finally modern electron optics and its relationship to the Muslim golden age in science. The book’s fourth part discusses various applications of optics and light in today's world, including biophotonics, art, optical communication, nanotechnology, the eye as an optical instrument, remote sensing, and optics in medicine. In turn, the last part focuses on quantum optics, a modern field that grew out of the interaction of light and matter. Topics addressed include atom optics, slow, stored and stationary light, optical tests of the foundation of physics, quantum mechanical properties of light fields carrying orbital angular momentum, quantum communication, and Wave-Particle dualism in action.
Download or read book Empire of Light written by Sidney Perkowitz and published by Joseph Henry Press. This book was released on 1998-11-23 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Empire of Light, Sidney Perkowitz combines the expertise of a physicist with the vision of an art connoisseur and the skill of an accomplished writer to offer a unique view of the most fundamental feature of the universe: light. Empire of Light discusses the nature of light, how the eye sees, and how our understanding of these phenomena have emerged over the ages, including the role of light in the development of quantum physics. The author examines the making of electrical light and its integration into commerce, telecommunications, entertainment, medicine, warfare, and every other aspect of our daily lives. And he presents the role of light in the search for the beginning and the end of the universe, as astronomers with their instruments penetrate ever deeper into the sky. Visible light spans the spectrum between infrared and ultraviolet, but this book reaches across many other spectra as well--from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Mark Rothko's stark blocks of color in today's art museums, from Plato's speculation that the eye sends out rays to Ramon y Cajal's discovery that vision actually works in the opposite way, from Tycho Brahe's elegant antetelescope measurements of planet positions to the Hubble telescope's exquisite sensitivity to light from billions of light years away. What are the biological and neurological processes of perceiving visible light? How does a person typically scan a scene? Do you see red or blue the same way I do? What are our physiological reactions and emotional responses to light? Perkowitz explores these and many other fascinating questions, drawing together the experiences, achievements, and perspectives of a diverse cast of characters, including Galileo, Einstein, Newton, Van Gogh, and Edison. Empire of Light is written so that lay readers will readily grasp the scientific principles and science professionals will readily appreciate the human experience. It will impart new wonder to the daily experience of light in our world. Sidney Perkowitz is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University. His work has appeared in national publications such as The Sciences, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and Technology Review.
Download or read book Catching the Light written by Arthur Zajonc and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination of the fundamental nature of light in mankind's history, world, and life.
Download or read book Names for Light written by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book. Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.
Download or read book Flickering Light written by Christoph Ribbat and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without neon, Las Vegas might still be a sleepy desert town in Nevada and Times Square merely another busy intersection in New York City. Transformed by the installation of these brightly colored signs, these destinations are now world-famous, representing the vibrant heart of popular culture. But for some, neon lighting represents the worst of commercialism. Energized by the conflicting love and hatred people have for neon, Flickering Light explores its technological and intellectual history, from the discovery of the noble gas in late nineteenth-century London to its fading popularity today. Christoph Ribbat follows writers, artists, and musicians—from cultural critic Theodor Adorno, British rock band the Verve, and artist Tracey Emin to Vladimir Nabokov, Langston Hughes, and American country singers—through the neon cities in Europe, America, and Asia, demonstrating how they turned these blinking lights and letters into metaphors of the modern era. He examines how gifted craftsmen carefully sculpted neon advertisements, introducing elegance to modern metropolises during neon’s heyday between the wars followed by its subsequent popularity in Las Vegas during the 1950s and '60s. Ribbat ends with a melancholy discussion of neon’s decline, describing how these glowing signs and installations came to be seen as dated and characteristic of run-down neighborhoods. From elaborate neon lighting displays to neglected diner signs with unlit letters, Flickering Light tells the engrossing story of how a glowing tube of gas took over the world—and faded almost as quickly as it arrived.
Download or read book Words of Light written by Eduardo Cadava and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings: the historical and political consequences of technology, the relation between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, and visual and linguistic representation. The book establishes the photographic constellation of motifs and themes around which Benjamin organizes his texts and thereby becomes a lens through which we can begin to view his analysis of the convergence between the new technological media and a revolutionary concept of historical action and understanding. Written in the form of theses--what Cadava calls "snapshots in prose"--the book memorializes Benjamin's own thetic method of writing. It enacts a mode of conceiving history that is neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous--constructed from what Benjamin calls "dialectical images." In this way, it not only suggests the essential rapport between the fragmentary form of Benjamin's writing and his effort to write a history of modernity but it also skillfully clarifies the relation between Benjamin and his contemporaries, the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. It gives us the most complete picture to date of Benjamin's reflections on history.
Download or read book Electric Light written by Sandy Isenstadt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How electric light created new spaces that transformed the built environment and the perception of modern architecture. In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of architecture—as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then electricity—instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent—is modernity's medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.
Download or read book History of the Principle of Interference of Light written by N. Kipnis and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The controversy between the wave theory and the emission theory of light early in the nineteenth century has been a subject of numerous studies. Yet many is sues remain unclear, in particular, the reasons for rejecting Young's theory of light. It appears that further progress in the field requires a better grasp of the overall situation in optics and related subjects at the time and a more thorough study of every factor suggested to be of importance for the dispute. This book is intended to be a step in this direction. It examines the impact of the concept of interference of light on the development of the early nineteenth century optics in general, and the theory of light, in particular. This is not a his tory of the wave theory of light, nor is it a history of the debate on the nature of light in general: it covers only that part of the controversy which involved the concept of interference. Although the book deals with a number of scientists, scientific institutions, and journals, its main character is a scientific concept, the principle of interference. While discussing the reasons for accepting or rejecting this concept I have primarily focused on scientific factors, although in some cases the human factor is examined as well. The book is a revised Ph. D. dissertation (University of Minnesota, 1984) writ ten under Alan E. Shapiro.
Download or read book The Victorian Eye written by Chris Otter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society. The Victorian Eye’s innovative interdisciplinary approach—and generous illustrations—will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.
Download or read book American Lucifers written by Jeremy Zallen and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor—those American lucifers—as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.
Download or read book Light in Art written by Massimo Mariani and published by Hoaki. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brimming with illustrations, this stunningly original book presents the role of light in art throughout history. This richly illustrated book takes readers on a tour through the history of art to learn how artists have used light (and its lack of it as shadow) to make a statement about their subject matter or create a specific mood, with examples by masters such as Giotto, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Courbet, Turner, Klimt, and many more, as well as theoretical approaches starting with Plato and Aristotle, moving on to Descartes, Newton, Goethe and Chevreul. Throughout history, artists have played with light, approaching it as both a subject and tool to create the desired atmosphere, convey ideas, and inspire emotions in the viewer. In medieval frescoes, rays of light stood for the presence of the divine, while 17th-century Dutch painters used light to indicate depth and construct an impactful setting. The Impressionists wanted to depict light itself and the way it plays upon the surfaces of objects in the form of color. Photography and film have used light, both natural and artificial, to make things visible in the first place. This volume delves into these and many more topics and constitutes a perfect reference book for artists, students, scholars, and art lovers.
Download or read book A History of Light written by Junko Theresa Mikuriya and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When was photography invented, in 1826 with the first permanent photograph? If we depart from the technologically oriented accounts and consider photography as a philosophical discourse an alternative history appears, one which examines the human impulse to reconstruct the photographic or “the evoking of light”. It's significance throughout the history of ideas is explored via the Platonic Dialogues, Iamblichus' theurgic writings, and Marsilio Ficino's texts. This alternative history is not a replacement of other narratives of photographic history but rather offers a way of rethinking photography's ontological instability.
Download or read book A History of Color written by Robert A. Crone and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive text on the history of color theories since Halbertsma's book of 1947. Color is discussed in close connection with the evolution of ideas of light and vision. The book has chapters on the ancient Greek ideas of vision and color; on the contributions of Arabic science; on the Scientific Revolution from Kepler to Newton; on the early history of the three-color hypothesis; on the trichromatic theory and defective color vision; and on Goethe's, Schopenhauer's and Hering's theories. New understanding of the structure and functions of the retina and the brain finally results in the modern science of color vision. A History of Color has been written for ophthalmologists, optometrists and others who are interested in visual science and its history. The book requires no specialized knowledge.
Download or read book There Was A Light written by Rich Tupica and published by Permuted Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time as a traditional paperback, this revised and updated edition contains new and archival interviews with those closest to Chris Bell and the Big Star circle: their friends, family, former bandmates—even fans, exes, classmates, and coworkers. “Bell’s and Big Star’s existence was short, but the wealth of stories and quotes here provides a healthy sustenance for the truth seekers. A top-notch biography.” —San Francisco Book Review The varied cast of voices—many from the band’s hometown of Memphis—comprises all the members of Big Star, including Chris Bell, the iconic Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel, and Jody Stephens. In the following decades after its 1975 breakup, the obscure group somehow reached and inspired some of rock’s most important bands, including R.E.M., the Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Teenage Fanclub, Beck, and Wilco. With Chris Bell at the center of the Big Star universe, this book carefully reveals the production of the band’s masterful 1972 debut LP, #1 Record, for Ardent/Stax Records. Despite stellar reviews, the record suffered abysmal sales. Soon after, toxic personality conflicts and turmoil tore the band apart while Bell battled drug abuse and depression. There Was A Light then delves into Big Star’s second and third albums, while recounting Bell’s second act as a struggling solo musician and born-again Christian. During several trips to Europe, he produced ambitious recordings and pitched himself to record labels—even crossing paths with Paul McCartney. From this fertile era arose Bell’s lone solo album, the posthumously released I Am the Cosmos—his swan song and masterpiece. There Was A Light details the pop culture phenomenon that made Big Star legendary and divulges how its staunch fanbase saved the band from obscurity. “... an encyclopedic compendium…illuminating Bell’s life from a thousand angles.” —Memphis Flyer
Download or read book A History of Electric Light Power written by Brian Bowers and published by Peter Peregrinus Limited. This book was released on 1982 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
