A History of Optics: From Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, Olivier Darrigol, Oxford U. Press, New York, 2012. $63.00 (327 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-964437-7
Olivier Darrigol’s A History of Optics: From Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century presents an expert, long-term history of optics in the Western tradition, from the inception of optics in ancient Greek philosophy to the maturation of classical wave optics in 19th-century Europe. Darrigol’s intellectual history examines a 2500-year-long conversation among philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists aimed at elucidating the nature of optical phenomena and resolving the debate between medium-based and corpuscular theories of light.
For the sake of economy, Darrigol construes the history narrowly. He does not incorporate the social and cultural history of optics. Instead he has constructed an internal history, an examination of optical theories largely detached from the contexts in which they were formulated. The success in this approach is the author’s depiction, supplemented by frequent quotations from primary texts, of the historical actors’ engagement with previous and even ancient optical theories.
The science of optics shifted in the 17th century from a theory of vision to a theory of light. The author, perhaps because of his expertise in the history of modern physics, concentrates on that latter development at the expense of investigating early theories in detail. Indeed, the history of optics from the ancient Greeks to Johannes Kepler comprises a single chapter, the book’s first. The second chapter examines mechanical-medium theories of the 17th century. The third, the only one devoted to a single historical figure, examines the optics of Isaac Newton; perhaps because it gets its own chapter, the treatment of the development of Newton’s optical theory is exceptional. The fourth chapter examines 18th-century optics, and the final three chapters examine 19th-century explanations of interference, polarization, ether, waves, and rays. The emphasis on the 19th century suggests that the audience for the book is not all historians of physics but historians of 19th-century physics and physicists interested in the history of optics as a backdrop to the science’s more modern developments.
The chapter concerning the 2000 years of optics from the ancient Greeks to Kepler is in places inaccurate and a bit careless. For instance, reading Aristotle through the lens of 19th-century theories, the author conflates an optical medium with ether, as understood in the 19th century, and thereby misinterprets the relevance of Aristotle’s Aether, the material of the heavens, to his theory of vision. In addition, explorations into the intersections of optics with other sciences are generally kept to a minimum in A History of Optics. When discussing Ptolemy’s optics, the author only briefly mentions the relevance of refraction to astronomy and does not elaborate on how refraction comes into play in Ptolemy’s astronomy. At the very least, it would have been useful to reference the changing explanations in Ptolemy’s writings, from the Almagest to the Optics, for why celestial bodies appear larger at the horizon than at the zenith. In doing so, Darrigol would have at least acknowledged that Ptolemy’s optics, like Newton’s, developed over time. Furthermore, such a reference would have shown how optics intersects with other mathematical sciences—in this case, astronomy. However, the author does warn in his preface that, in composing a “compact long-term history,” he made efforts to trim the narrative.
Although it targets a narrow audience, A History of Optics is a welcome addition since it is the only concise, intellectual history of optics covering such a long period. Instructors in the history of science will no doubt use it as a textbook in introductory history of physics courses; physicists, and specifically optical physicists, may enjoy witnessing the development of the discipline through the millennia.
