Table of Contents

Introduction

I. History
1.) Ancient Optics - Magnification Without Lenses
2.) The Solar Weapon of Archimedes
3.) Claudius Ptolemy's Law of Refraction
4.) Antonio de Ulloa's Mystery
5.) The Miracle of St. Gascoigne
6.) Rays of the Sun
7.) Roy G. Biv
8.) George Christoph Lichtenberg
9.) Hopkinson's Silk Handkerchief
10.) First Light - Thomas Melville and the Beginnings of Spectroscopy
11.) Mediocrity and Illumination
12.) Even If You Can't Draw a Straight Line
13.) A Sea Change
14.) Thomas Pearsall and the Ultraviolet
15.) If at First You Don't Succeed
16.) More than a Burner
17.) Apply Light Pressure
18.) Sound Movies, the World's Fair, and Stellar Spectroscopy
19.) Déjà vu
20.) The Magic Lantern of Omar Khayyam

II. Weird Science
21.) The Yellow Sun Paradox
22.) Once in a Blue Moon
23.) Chromatic Dispersions
24.) The Eye in the Spiral
25.) Retroreflectors
26.) Yes, I was Right! It is Obvious!
27.) Edible Lasers
28.) Pyrotechnic Lasers
29.) Defunct Lasers
30.) The Phantom Laser
31.) The Case of the Oily Mirrors; A Locked Room mystery
32.) Pinhole Glasses
33.) Undulations

III. Pop Culture
34.) This is Your Cat on Lasers
35.) Dord
36.) Zap!
37.) Mystic Cameras
38.) Playing With Light
39.) I Must Find That Tractor Beam
40.) The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Starbow
41.) Diamonds in the Dark
42.) A Popular History of the Laser
43.) Pop Culture Errors in Optics
44.) Pop Spectrum
45.) The Telephote
Afterword

About the Author

Stephen Wilk is a contributing editor for the Optical Society of America and the author of Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (OUP; 2000). He holds a Ph.D. in Physics and has worked on Laser Propulsion and High Energy Lasers at Textron and MIT's Lincoln Labs, and has designed and built optical apparatus at Optikos Corporation, Cognex, and AOtec. He was previously a visiting professor at Tufts and a visiting scientist at MIT.

Reviews

"This unique collection of essays resolves all kinds of interesting questions about optics that appear in history and popular culture. Dr. Wilk has done a splendid job in researching the material and providing answers at a level that will be accessible to a very wide range of readers."
--Mark Fox, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield
"Do you wonder how the rainbow was divined into colors or how ray guns came to science fiction? Stephen Wilk tells the real histories behind optical myths and stories. Great fun for the curious mind."
--Jeff Hecht, author of Beam: The Race to Make the Laser
"[Readers] will be rewarded with both plenty of optics-based entertainment and some excellent knowledge, worthy of Stephen Fry and QI."
--Popular Science
"I certainly learned a lot about our fascinating field, and was delightfully amused. You will be, too!" --Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, professor of optometry, physics and electrical and computer engineering, University of Waterloo, Optics & Photonics News