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  2. Light - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

    The particle theory of light led Pierre-Simon Laplace to argue that a body could be so massive that light could not escape from it. In other words, it would become what is now called a black hole . Laplace withdrew his suggestion later, after a wave theory of light became firmly established as the model for light (as has been explained, neither ...

  3. Fermat's principle - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_principle

    On 30 January 1809, [60] Pierre-Simon Laplace, reporting on the work of his protégé Étienne-Louis Malus, claimed that the extraordinary refraction of calcite could be explained under the corpuscular theory of light with the aid of Maupertuis's principle of least action: that the integral of speed with respect to distance was a minimum. The ...

  4. Light field - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field

    A light field, or lightfield, is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in a space. The space of all possible light rays is given by the five-dimensional plenoptic function , and the magnitude of each ray is given by its radiance .

  5. Numerical aperture - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_aperture

    In laser physics, numerical aperture is defined slightly differently.Laser beams spread out as they propagate, but slowly. Far away from the narrowest part of the beam, the spread is roughly linear with distance—the laser beam forms a cone of light in the "far field".

  6. Corpuscular theory of light - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpuscular_theory_of_light

    Physics - Newton's corpuscular theory of light - Science. elearnin. Uploaded 5 Jan 2013. Robert Hooke's Critique of Newton's Theory of Light and Colors (delivered 1672) Robert Hooke. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society, vol. 3 (London: 1757), pp. 10–15. Newton Project, University of Sussex. Corpuscule or Wave. Arman Kashef. 2022.

  7. Coherence (physics) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_(physics)

    Light also has a polarization, which is the direction in which the electric or magnetic field oscillates. Unpolarized light is composed of incoherent light waves with random polarization angles. The electric field of the unpolarized light wanders in every direction and changes in phase over the coherence time of the two light waves.

  8. Optical path length - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_path_length

    In optics, optical path length (OPL, denoted Λ in equations), also known as optical length or optical distance, is the length that light needs to travel through a vacuum to create the same phase difference as it would have when traveling through a given medium.

  9. Principle of locality - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_locality

    In physics, the principle of locality states that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. A theory that includes the principle of locality is said to be a "local theory". This is an alternative to the concept of instantaneous, or "non-local" action at a distance.