Syllabus
1) Ancient Greece and Rome i) Philosophy of physics, role of experiment in knowledge of the world ii) Aristotle and his assumptions iii) Transition to the time of Kepler and Galileo
2) Theory of the mechanical medium i) Descartes, Hobbes, Hooke, Pardies and Huygens ii) Optical imaging
3) Theory of light in the 17th and 18th centuries i) Newton and his contribution to wave and corpuscular theory ii) Euler and neo-Cartesian theories of light iii) Young's experiment, interference and polarization iv) Laplace, Malus, Brewster and others v) Fresnel's theory, diffraction of light
4) Ether and matter i) Wave and ray theory, electromagnetic theory of light ii) Fourier synthesis iii) Experiments regarding ether and medium iv) The path to the special theory of relativity
Annotation
The development of optics as a field of physics will be outlined in several thematic areas. Many people participated in the development of optics, and this seminar aims to put into context the given time, the philosophical mood and the main achievements of selected scientists.
We will deal with philosophical problems and early ideas of light perception, through experimental perception and theoretical models in the early modern period to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves. Finally, we take a look at the experiments that helped with the formulation special theory of relativity.