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200
Pythagoras
Pythagoras, 6th Century, BC. The mathematician Pythagoras tried his theory that light is made of beams, that came straight from the person's eye, and we are able to see something when those beams are touching the object(s) we are looking at (But we can't see in the dark!). His theory, for many years, was taken as true (even though it wasn't). -
Period: 200 to
Timeline
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250
Archimedes
Archimedes, 212 BC. Archimedes developed a plan to burn enemy ships by using giant mirrors to refelct light to the ships, and then to set them on fire. -
300
Euclid
Euclid, 300 BC. One of Euclid's many discoveries include his about how when you shine a beam of light onto a flat mirror, the incoming beam's angle and the mirror is the same as it between the outgoing beam and the mirror. Also, he brought up of how light travelled in straight lines (correct). -
Jan 1, 700
Ptolemy
Ptolemy, First Century, AD. Ptolemy (who was an astronomer) told how normal light beams can bend, when going from the air to a glass surface. -
Jan 1, 1000
Al-Haytham
Al-haytham, 100, AD. Al-Haytham, a talented Arab scientist studied light, as well as works from Pythagoras and Euclid; then wrote a bookon optics. When he described how light worked - that light bounces off objects, then goes to the eye.In this, it reveals that light doesn't originate from the eye like Pythagoras thought it did. Rather, the light comes to the eye. Pythagoras' theory was abandoned. -
Sir Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton, Approx. Late 1600's. This English scientist whoed proof of white light being not only one color, but many; by shining the white beam of light though a transparent prism. As it passed through, it split into many different colors - a rainbow! When those colors were put through a second prism, the colors were changed into the original state of a white light. -
Ole Romer
Ole Romer was the first to make a reasonable and reliable measurement of how fast light could travel. But, his discoveries were improved by Albert A. Michelson. -
Albert A. Michelson
How Albert improved Ole's studies was by placing two mirrors on the top of two mountains, 35.4km apart, in California. Then, he send a beam of light from one mirror to the other on the other mountain. Using extremely accurate timing devices to measure how long it took the beam to reach the other mirror; he divided the distance by the time it took (35.4 / time = speed of light), he calculated that, in Earth's atmosphere, it took 299,798km/second to reach the second mountain.