Firenze, Italy

Optics and Optometry

Ottica e optometria

Bachelor's
Language: ItalianStudies in Italian
University website: www.unifi.it
Optics
Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Because light is an electromagnetic wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves exhibit similar properties.
Optometry
Optometry is a health care profession which involves examining the eyes and applicable visual systems for defects or abnormalities as well as the medical diagnosis and management of eye disease. Traditionally, the field of optometry began with the primary focus of correcting refractive error through the use of spectacles. Modern day optometry, however, has evolved through time so that the education curriculum additionally includes intensive medical training in the diagnosis and management of ocular disease in countries where the profession is established and regulated.
Optics
Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say, what the use, were finer optics giv'n,
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733-34), Epistle I, line 193.
Optics
Contemporary with Vitellio and Peccam was... Roger Bacon, a man of almost universal genius, and who wrote on almost every branch of science. He frequently quotes Alhazen on the subject of optics, and seems to have carefully studied his writings, as well as those of other Arabians, which were the fountains of natural knowledge in those days, and which had been introduced into Europe by means of the Moors in Spain. Notwithstanding the pains this great man took with the subject of opticks, it does not appear that, with respect to theory, he made any considerable advance upon what Alhazen had done before him.
Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772)
Optics
(Ptolemy) left in his Optics, the earliest surviving table of angles of refraction from air to water. ...This table, quoted and requoted until modern times, has been admired... A closer glance at it, however, suggests that there was less experimentation involved in it than originally was thought, for the values of the angles of refraction form an arithmetic progression of second order... As in other portions of Greek Science, confidence in mathematics was here greater than that in the evidence of the senses, although the value corresponding to 60° agrees remarkably well with experience.
Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959)
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