- 130 – Claudius Ptolemy tabulates angles of refraction for several
media, - 1269 – PŽlerin de Maricourt describes magnetic poles and remarks on the
nonexistence of isolated magnetic poles, - 1305 – Dietrich von Freiberg uses crystalline spheres and flasks filled
with water to study the reflection and refraction in raindrops that
leads to primary and secondary rainbows, - 1604 – Johannes Kepler describes how the eye focuses light,
- 1604 – Johann Kepler specifies the laws of the rectilinear propagation
of the light, - 1611 – Marko Dominis discusses the rainbow in De Radiis Visus et Lucis,
- 1611 – Johannes Kepler discovers total internal reflection, a small
angle refraction law, and thin lens optics, - 1621 – Willebrord van Roijen Snell states his Snell’s law of
refraction, - 1630 – Cabaeus found that there are two types of electric charges
- 1637 – RenŽ Descartes quantitatively derives the angles at which
primary and secondary rainbows are seen with respect to the angle of
the Sun’s elevation, - 1657 – Pierre de Fermat introduces the principle of least time into
optics, - 1665 – Francesco Maria Grimaldi highlights the phenomena of diffraction
- 1673 – Ignace Pardies provides a wave explanation for refraction of
light - 1675 – Isaac Newton delivers his theory of light
- 1676 – Olaus Roemer measures the speed of light by observing Jupiter’s
moons - 1678 – Christian Huygens states his principle of wavefront sources,
- 1704 – Isaac Newton publishes Opticks, a corpuscular theory of light
and colour, - 1728 – James Bradley discovers the aberration of starlight and uses it
to determine that the speed of light is about 283,000 km/s, - 1746 – Leonhard Euler develops the wave theory of light refraction and
dispersion - 1752 – Benjamin Franklin shows that lightning is electricity,
- 1767 – Joseph Priestley proposes an electrical inverse-square law,
- 1785 – Charles Coulomb introduces the inverse-square law of
electrostatics, - 1786 – Luigi Galvani discovers “animal electricity and postulates that
animal bodies are storehouses of electricity, - 1800 – William Herschel discovers infrared radiation from the Sun
- 1801 – Johann Ritter discovers ultraviolet radiation from the Sun,
- 1801 – Thomas Young demonstrates the wave nature of light and the
principle of interference, - 1808 – Etienne-Louis Malus discovers polarization by reflection,
- 1809 – Etienne-Louis Malus publishes the law of Malus which predicts
the light intensity transmitted by two polarizing sheets, - 1811 – Franois Jean Dominique Arago discovers that some quartz
crystals will continuously rotate the electric vector of light, - 1816 – David Brewster discovers stress birefringence,
- 1818 – Simeon Poisson predicts the Poisson-Arago bright spot at the
center of the shadow of a circular opaque obstacle, - 1818 – Franois Jean Dominique Arago verifies the existence of the
Poisson-Arago bright spot, - 1820 – Hans Christian ¯rsted notices that a current in a wire can
deflect a compass needle, - 1825 – Augustin Fresnel phenomenologically explains optical activity by
introducing circular birefringence, - 1826 – Georg Simon Ohm states his Ohm’s law of electrical resistance,
- 1831 – Michael Faraday states his law of induction,
- 1833 – Heinrich Lenz states that an induced current in a closed
conducting loop will appear in such a direction that it opposes the
change that produced it (Lenz’s law), - 1845 – Michael Faraday discovers that light propagation in a material
can be influenced by external magnetic fields, - 1849 – Armand Fizeau and Jean-Bernard Foucault measure the speed of
light to be about 298,000 km/s, - 1852 – George Gabriel Stokes defines the Stokes parameters of
polarization, - 1864 – James Clerk Maxwell publishes his papers on a dynamical theory
of the electromagnetic field, - 1871 – Lord Rayleigh discusses the blue sky law and sunsets (Rayleigh
scattering), - 1873 – James Clerk Maxwell states that light is an electromagnetic
phenomenon, - 1875 – John Kerr discovers the electrically induced birefringence of
some liquids, - 1879 – Jo?ef Stefan discovers the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law of a
blackbody and uses it to calculate the first sensible value of the
temperature of a Sun’s surface to be 5700 K, - 1888 – Heinrich Rudolf Hertz discovers radio waves,
- 1895 – Wilhelm Conrad Ršntgen discovers X-rays,
- 1896 – Arnold Sommerfeld solves the half-plane diffraction problem,
- 1956 – R. Hanbury-Brown and R.Q. Twiss complete the correlation
interferometer.
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