...there were
Maxwell's equations. Although one could probably begin the discussion much earlier with
Euclid who ca 330 BC began studying optics through the mathematical framework he pioneered. I do not wish to recount the vast history of optics research and have chosen as my starting point the emergence of classical wave optics. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell writing more than two millenia after Euclid in 1861 was the first person who succeeded in unifying all hitherto research in optics with his set of 4 equations which put forth the notion of light as an electromagnetic wave. The wave nature is significant principally because an intellectual war had been raging in the centuries before Maxwell between proponents of the corpuscular theory of light whose main advocate was the towering scientific figure of
Isaac Newton and those in support of the wave nature of light lead by the Dutch physicist
Christiaan Huygens. The corpuscular nature of light did experience a revival in the early part of the 20th century with the advent of quantum mechanics and ultimately gave rise to the notion of
wave-particle duality but we shall not explore that topic for a while. At their core, the four equations constituting Maxwell's equations explain the following phenomena: 1) time-varying electric fields and electric currents produce spatially-varying magnetic fields, 2) there are no magnetic monopoles, 3) time-varying magnetic fields give rise to spatially-varying electric-fields, and finally 4) electric fields are derived from electric charges. Maxwell showed that these four equations can be manipulated and equivalently expressed in terms of a wave equation that accurately describe the behavior of electromagnetic waves having wavelengths that span nearly 18 orders of magnitude: from radio waves used in telecommunications (100s of m) to gamma rays (1e-11 m) produced by sub-atomic particle interactions.
After some thought, I have decided to retire the 'Eloquent Delinquent'. This might seem a little surprising to some but I have decided that I need to take this weblog in a new direction, one that is closer to my nascent scientific career. Starting today, this blog will be about the wondrous entity that is
light and the blossoming field of
photonics: I will attempt to explain in simple, clear and precise language the sheer beauty of what light is from a theoretical and computational perspective. I can think of nothing more captivating in the universe than light and feel that a forum like this can be a valuable place to disseminate information. There are at least 2 other blogs out there -
Excited Light &
the Photonics Spotlight - that focus on photonics but do so from an experimental framework focused mostly on laser technology. To my knowledge, this will be the first and only blog dedicated to the theoretical and computational investigation of light. This new blog, christened 'a universe of photons', will feature weekly posts on the nature of light along with key scientific milestones, reviews of important theoretical breakthroughs and novel computational approaches to model light both past and present, and commentary on all such things. I hope you enjoy.