This book is a long-term history of optics, from early Greek theories of vision to the nineteenth-century victory of the wave theory of light. It shows how light gradually became the central entity of a domain of physics that no longer referred to the functioning of the eye; it retraces the subsequent competition between medium-based and corpuscular concepts of light; and it details the nineteenth-century flourishing of mechanical ether theories. The author critically exploits and sometimes completes the more specialized histories that have flourished in the past few years. The resulting synthesis brings out the actors' long-term memory, their dependence on broad cultural shifts, and the evolution of disciplinary divisions and connections. Conceptual precision, textual concision, and abundant illustration make the book accessible to a broad variety of readers interested in the origins of modern optics.

Section Guide 1. Prolegomena 2. Biographical Sketch 3. Epistemology 4. Textbook Ontology 1. PROLEGOMENA While both philosophers and historians almost always love truth and the search for truth, and both often carry out extensive research, there can be noticeable differences when historians write about the history of philosophy and when philosophers write about it. Philosophers often look at the past with categories and interests taken from the present or at the least from the recent past, but many historians, especially those who love research for its own sake, will try to look at the past from a perspective either from that period or from even earlier. Both camps look for roots, but view them with different lenses and presupposi tions. This prolegomena has been added to prepare some philosophers for what will hopefully only be the mildest of shocks, for seeing the history of philosophy in a way which does not treat what is recent or latest as best, but which loves the context of ideas for its own sake, a context which can be very foreign to contemporary likes and dislikes. To be sure, we historians can deceive ourselves as easily as philosophers, but we tend to do so about different things.