How Light Interacts with Matter
The everyday objects around us are white, colored or black, opaque or transparent, depending on how the electrons in their atoms or molecules respond to the driving force of electromagnetic radiation...
Features
How Light is Analyzed
By separating light into its constituents the spectroscopist learns what kinds of matter are in the source. With modern techniques such as Fourier spectroscopy highly informative spectra can be obtained...
How Images are Formed
New procedures based on wave theory and executed by computers have supplemented the traditional techniques of ray optics. The result is a major advance in the quality of lenses and the images they form...
How Images are Detected
The most versatile detector of light images is the visual system of vertebrates. Nonetheless, photographic emulsions and electronic image detectors improve on biological systems in significant ways...
Applications of Laser Light
They range from the straightforward (such as surveying and welding) to the sophisticated (such as optical communication and holography), and it may be that more interesting applications are still to come...
The Chemical Effects of Light
Visible light triggers few chemical reactions (except in living cells), but the photons of ultraviolet radiation readily break chemical bonds and produce short-lived molecular fragments with unusual properties...
How Light Interacts with Living Matter
Light activates three key processes of life: photosynthesis, vision and photoperiodism (the response of plants and animals to the cycle of night and day). Such activation is mediated by specific pigments...
The Control of the Luminous Environment
Architecture, which for millenniums was dependent on natural sources of light, has in the past century increasingly turned to artificial sources. In the long run it must perfect the integrated use of both...
The Processes of Vision
Light enables us to see, but optical images on the retina are only the starting point of the complex activities of visual perception and visual memory
Departments
50 and 100 Years Ago: September 1968
Science and the Citizen: September 1968
- Letters
Letters to the Editors, September 1968
- Recommended
Books
- Mathematical Recreation
Mathematical Games
- Amateur Scientist
The Amateur Scientist
- Departments
The Authors
Bibliography
