JF Ptak Science Books
I found this very interesting image in the early pages of T.E.R. Phillip's astronomical review and history, Hutchinson's Splendour of the Heavens, issued by the publishing house whose name is in the title, and printed in London in 1923. What we see here is a representation of light, or at least the corpuscular theory of light and the movement of the corpuscles. The theory is partially the work of the Christian atomist Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who argued that light was composed of infinitesimally small particles traveling at finite speeds and in a straight line in all directions.
The corpuscular theory preceded the wave theory which preceded the EM theory which preceded the quantum theory of light, and it is interesting to note that even though this work was published 18 years after the Einstein paper of 1905 and four years following the Eddington/Dyson et al eclipse confirmation of relativity after which Einstein became a mega-star, that there is scant mention of this paper in this book in spite of his 14 other mentions.'
Still, this is a pretty cool rendering of the "shape" and constituents of light.
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