Light Fantastic (TV series)
Encyclopedia
Light Fantastic is the title of a television documentary series that explores the phenomenon of light and aired in December 2004 on BBC Four
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....

. The series comprised four programmes respectively titled: "Let There be Light"; "The Light of Reason"; "The Stuff of Light"; and "Light, The Universe and Everything." The material was presented by Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 academic Simon Schaffer
Simon Schaffer
Simon Schaffer . He is a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and was until recently editor of The British Journal for the History of Science.-Life:Schaffer was born in Southampton and attended Varndean...

.

Let There be Light

The first episode shows how the desire, by Greek, Arab and Christian scholars to penetrate the divine nature of light lead to modern science's origins. The programme explores the contributions of Empedocles
Empedocles
Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...

; Euclid
Euclid
Euclid , fl. 300 BC, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "Father of Geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I...

; Al Hazen; Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...

; Descartes and Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

.

Greek scholars

The nature of light, and how we see, was first investigated by the early Greek philosophers. Light seemed to fill all space while allowing a kind of penetration of the world thus offering a clue to the structure of the whole universe. The world was bathed in light but, to bring it within the world of reason, it was necessary to abstract and choose phenomina where light behaved in a special or strange way: Why do faraway objects appear smaller and why do objects change their position and shape when placed underwater?.

Empedocles' idea, that we see objects because light streams out of our eyes
Emission theory (vision)
Emission theory or extramission theory is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by rays of light emitted by the eyes. This theory has been replaced by intromission theory, which states that visual perception comes from something representative of the object entering the eyes...

 and touches them, became the fundamental basis on which mathematicians would construct some of the most important theories on light and vision. Euclid's Optics
Euclid's Optics
Euclid's Optics, is a work on the geometry of vision written by the Greek mathematician Euclid around 300 BC. The earliest surviving manuscript of Optics is in Greek and dates from the 10th century AD....

 expanded this idea to make an important breakthrough: We know in our minds that a faraway building is bigger, yet it is possible to position a finger such that our eye tells us they are of similar size
Perspective (visual)
Perspective, in context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes; or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects...

. Euclid's elegant solution was that the eye and both the tops of finger and building must lie on the same line - thus the rays from the eye must follow straight lines; the new discipline of geometry could thus make predictions and solve problems of light and optics.

Al Hazen

Al Hazen earned a living selling his copies of Euclid's Geometry before obtaining the patronage of Al Hakim
Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah
Abu ‘Ali Mansur Tāriqu l-Ḥākim, called Al-Hakim bi Amr al-Lāh , was the sixth Fatimid caliph and 16th Ismaili imam .- History :...

, 6th Fatimid Caliph in Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

. Al Hazen was unable to fulfill his task of stopping the flooding of the Nile
Flooding of the Nile
has been an important natal cycle in Egypt since ancient times. It is celebrated by Egyptians as an annual holiday for two weeks starting August 15, known as Wafaa El-Nil. It is also celebrated in the Coptic Church by ceremonially throwing a martyr's relic into the river, hence the name, Esba`...

 and was imprisoned. Here he noted a problem with Empedocles's theory: having been in darkness and then suddenly exposed to light, his eyes felt intense pain. It seemed improbable that, if rays were indeed emitted by the eye, this would happen; instead Al Hazen postulated that light rays travelled through space in straight lines and entered our eyes by bouncing off objects. He studied refraction and the symmetry of reflection, producing a seven-volume work
Book of Optics
The Book of Optics ; ; Latin: De Aspectibus or Opticae Thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis; Italian: Deli Aspecti) is a seven-volume treatise on optics and other fields of study composed by the medieval Muslim scholar Alhazen .-See also:* Science in medieval Islam...

 which became the new standard text.

Christian Science

In the centuries following Al Hazen's death, the Catholic Church determined to demonstrate its Divine authority and produce a "Christian" knowledge of light. The translation of the work of the islamic scholars allowed Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...

, in the 13thC, to study and develop Al Hazen's work
Opus Majus
The Opus Majus is the most important work of Roger Bacon. It was written in Medieval Latin, at the request of Pope Clement IV, to explain the work that Bacon had undertaken. The 840-page treatise ranges over all aspects of natural science, from grammar and logic to mathematics, physics, and...

 through experimentation with the distortion and colour effects of light through glass and water

The Light of Reason

The second episode explores the link between the development of practical tools that manipulate light and the emergence of new ideas. The subject is examined through the work of Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe , born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations...

; Galileo; Vermeer; Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke FRS was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but...

; William Herschel
William Herschel
Sir Frederick William Herschel, KH, FRS, German: Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel was a German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer. Born in Hanover, Wilhelm first followed his father into the Military Band of Hanover, but emigrated to Britain at age 19...

; Ole Rømer; Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 and Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics...

.

The Stuff of Light

The Third episode charts the discovery of the true nature of light and the subsequent development of modern technology such as electricity and mobile phones. The pioneers are credited as James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell of Glenlair was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This united all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and optics into a consistent theory...

; Joseph Swan
Joseph Swan
Sir Joseph Wilson Swan was a British physicist and chemist, most famous for the invention of the incandescent light bulb for which he received the first patent in 1878...

 William Armstrong; Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...

; Wilhelm Röntgen; J.J Thompson; and Max Planck
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS, was a German physicist who actualized the quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy. He is regarded as the founder of the quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.-Life and career:Planck came...

.

In 18scientic wonders of the Victorian world: A prism
Prism (optics)
In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light. The exact angles between the surfaces depend on the application. The traditional geometrical shape is that of a triangular prism with a triangular base and rectangular sides, and in colloquial use...


Light, The Universe and Everything

The final episode explores the relationship between light, the eye and the mind and the development of technologies such as photography and cinema. The achievements of John Dalton
John Dalton
John Dalton FRS was an English chemist, meteorologist and physicist. He is best known for his pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory, and his research into colour blindness .-Early life:John Dalton was born into a Quaker family at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, Cumberland,...

; Benjamin Thompson
Benjamin Thompson
Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford , FRS was an American-born British physicist and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics. He also served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Loyalist forces in America during the American...

; Thomas Young
Thomas Young (scientist)
Thomas Young was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work...

; Lord Rayleigh
John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, OM was an English physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered the element argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904...

; Joseph Priestly; Thomas Wedgwood
Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805)
Thomas Wedgwood , son of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, was an early experimenter with Humphry Davy in photography.-Life:...

; Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard J. Muybridge was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible...

; Etienne Jules Marey and Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...

 are discussed.

From their knowledge of colour blindness, some Victorian scientists believed they could prove the perceived cultural supremacy of the English by measuring differences of colour perception in different races. The idea was that animals were lower down the evolutionary scale but had better atuned senses than humans. If it could be proved that black people
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...

 had better responses to light and colour this would be evidence of their inferiority. In 1898 William Rivers, together with a group of Cambridge academics, set off for the Torres Straits to prove exactly this. Rivers used a tintometer
Tintometer
The Tintometer Limited was founded in 1885 by Joseph Williams Lovibond, the son of a prominent brewery owner in Greenwich, London. J.W. Lovibond developed the world's first practical colorimeter as a means of ensuring the high quality of his beer...

 but found his original hypothesis was false and that the range of "colour difference perception" of the islanders was little different from that of the English. When Rivers returned to England he spearheaded dissemination of the fact that there was no scientific evidence to support white supremacy
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...

.

The programme continues and describes Priestly's discovery of photosynthesis
Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is a chemical process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight. Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of bacteria, but not in archaea. Photosynthetic organisms are called photoautotrophs, since they can...

.

External links

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