and not all of these have been translated into English.
An image projected through a pinhole lens
is dim and rotated
one hundred and eighty degrees.
Optical lessons
Some objects emit light, some reflect it,
some refract or defract it, and some absorb it.
Some are opaque; others are transparent
or partly transparent to all or only some colors.
The angle of light that hits a mirror
is equal to the angle of light that bounces off.
Prisms, lenses, and small openings refract light,
bending it toward the perpendicular when entering a lens
and away from the perpendicular when leaving.
Thomas Young’s famous double-slit experiment
demonstrated diffraction and proved light is a wave.
Heisenberg and others showed it’s also a beam of particles.
Light travels in an elliptical wave
and many wavelengths can travel together incoherently,
but a polarized filter blocks waves in all but one direction.
So here I am this rainy morning, thinking
there ought to be many analogies in optics
to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment,
whether I am a source of light or reflect it,
whether, being optically dense, I refract light,
and whether I am incoherent or polarized.
I sit in my living room on the couch,
enjoying the gurgling and pitter-patting of rain.
If the sun were to peek from the clouds,
I would be willing to go outside
to look for the promised rainbow.
Alhazen’s book Maqala fi al-Hala wa Qaws Quzah
(“On the Rainbow and Halo”) proposed an incorrect
theory how a rainbow forms. The correct theory for the primary
rainbow was proposed by Theodoric of Freiberg in 1304, and
René Descartes explained the secondary rainbow in 1637.
Even so, Descartes did not understand the nature of color,
thinking that each color was a modification of white light. In
1672, Isaac Newton explained that white light is composed of a
spectrum of coloured light.
Alhazen’s book Maqala fi al-Hala wa Qaws Quzah (“On the Rainbow and Halo”) proposed an incorrect theory how a rainbow forms. The correct theory for the primary rainbow was proposed by Theodoric of Freiberg in 1304, and René Descartes explained the secondary rainbow in 1637. Even so, Descartes did not understand the nature of color, thinking that each color was a modification of white light. In 1672, Isaac Newton explained that white light is composed of a spectrum of coloured light.
See also in The book of science:
Readings on wikipedia: