Abstract
Invisibility is all about controlling and in some sense fooling light – it is a trick. Not a magic or mystical trick, of course, but a real, scientific slight of hand that must be carried out with great technical skill. If we are going to fool light, however, we must first understand what light is, how it moves through space, and how it interacts with matter. This chapter is all about the story of light and the incredible, many-thousand year history of how humanity has struggled to understand its diaphanous, shifting, and on occasion downright spooky nature.
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Notes
- 1.
The refractive indices of various optical solids, liquids and gases are readily available in almost any compilation of physical constants.
- 2.
Galileo’s suggestion was never popular. The satellites (not stars) were and still are invariably known as the Galilean moons of Jupiter.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Beech, M. (2012). A Very Brief History of Light. In: The Physics of Invisibility. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0616-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0616-7_2
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