Introduction and History

Abstract

The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: øωσ, light. During the first century B.C., the Roman poet Lucretius wrote a great poem “On the Nature of the Universe.”⁽¹⁾ (One may marvel that the poet of those days was interested in and understood so much science. It is perhaps more likely that Lucretius, the scientist, used poetry to express the intellectual wonderment of his subject. The tragedy is that the scientist of today is unable to express the wonder of his story in poetical ways.) His description is based on the Greek view of nature as expressed by Epicurus. Light is described in two ways: as an emission of “atoms” from a luminous source such as the sun, and also as a sloughing off of a very thin outer shell of an object, which conveys to our senses the shape, texture, color, and smell of the object.