Light ― A Matter of Ideas: From Antiquity to Modern Science

With cultural and artistic insights, Martin Pohl presents a sweeping narrative of light’s role in shaping science and society. This book is a translation of the original German edition Licht by Martin Pohl published by Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE in 2025. Our most advanced sensory organ, the eye, connects directly to the brain, processing around ten megabits of visual data per second. In a most direct way, it thus allows us to observe and interpret out environment. Since antiquity, philosophers and scientists have pondered the nature of light and vision. This book traces the evolution of scientific thought through the lens of light—from ancient hypotheses to modern applications in cosmology, medicine, and quantum physics. It examines how light reveals the early universe, distant stars, and microscopic worlds. With cultural and artistic insights, Martin Pohl presents a sweeping narrative of light’s role in shaping science and society. This book is a translation of the original German edition Licht by Martin Pohl published by Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE in 2025. The translation was done with the help of an artificial intelligence machine translation tool. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.