Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark - Issue 11: Light
▻http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/why-physicists-make-up-stories-in-the-dark
For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes work? And what is light itself? These are questions that preoccupied scientists and philosophers since the time of Aristotle, including Roger Bacon, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Thomas Young, and James Clerk Maxwell. But in the late 19th century all that changed, and it was largely Maxwell’s doing. This was the period in which the whole focus of physics—then still emerging as a distinct scientific discipline—shifted from the visible to the invisible. Light itself was instrumental to that change. Not only were the components of light invisible “fields,” but light was revealed as merely a small slice of a rainbow extending far into the unseen. Physics has (...)