From Sight to Light

Professor Smith teaches a variety of courses in medieval history as well as the history of science from antiquity to the late Enlightenment. Broadly speaking, his interests lie in the field of intellectual history from the pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, his scholarly focus being on the evolution of pre-Newtonian theories of visual perception.He has published articles in The American Historical Review, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Archive for History of Exact Sciences,Revue d’histoire des sciences, and Isis. He has twice been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1979 and 1986), and has been awarded not only an individual research grant (1986) and a sponsored project-grant (1989) from the National Endowment for the Humanities but also four sponsored project-grants from the National Science Foundation (2008, 2005, 2000, and 1999). A Guggenheim fellow (2007), he is also a Lifetime Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a Membre Effectif of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences.

出版者:The University of Chicago Press

作者:A. Mark Smith

页数:480

出版时间:2014-12-26

价格:USD 45.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780226174761

图书标签:科学史科学哲学与科学史未读完光学

From its inception in Greek antiquity, the science of optics was aimed primarily at explaining sight and accounting for why things look as they do. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the analytic focus of optics had shifted to light: its fundamental properties and such physical behaviors as reflection, refraction, and diffraction. This dramatic shift—which A. Mark Smith characterizes as the “Keplerian turn”—lies at the heart of this fascinating and pioneering study.

Breaking from previous scholarship that sees Johannes Kepler as the culmination of a long-evolving optical tradition that traced back to Greek antiquity via the Muslim Middle Ages, Smith presents Kepler instead as marking a rupture with this tradition, arguing that his theory of retinal imaging, which was published in 1604, was instrumental in prompting the turn from sight to light. Kepler’s new theory of sight, Smith reveals, thus takes on true historical significance: by treating the eye as a mere light-focusing device rather than an image-producing instrument—as traditionally understood—Kepler’s account of retinal imaging helped spur the shift in analytic focus that eventually led to modern optics.

A sweeping survey, From Sight to Light is poised to become the standard reference for historians of optics as well as those interested more broadly in the history of science, the history of art, and cultural and intellectual history.