Page:The wonders of optics (1869).djvu/84

 increasing spheres. In the case of light, when a luminous body is placed in space, the ether which surrounds it is thrown into a state of vibration, and the motion is immediately propagated in all directions, with extreme velocity. It is these undulations that produce upon our eyes the sensation of light. We may therefore say that light, like sound, is movement, while darkness, like silence, is absolute rest.

Many people still believe that light is propagated instantaneously, and cannot bring themselves to imagine that we do not see a flame the moment we light it, but only an instant after. I have myself spoken to well-educated people possessed of good judgment and a certain amount of elementary knowledge, who could never bring themselves to believe that we see the stars, not as they now exist, but as they appeared at the particular moment when the luminous wave by which we are enabled to perceive them left their surface, and which only reaches us after travelling through space a certain number of years, days, or hours, according to their distance. It is extremely useful and interesting to form a correct idea upon the way in which light is propagated.

The determination of the prodigious quickness with which the waves of light move through space, says Arago, is undoubtedly one of the happiest results of modern astronomy. The ancients believed that it moved with infinite velocity, and their view of the subject was not, like so many of the questions relating to physics, a mere opinion without proof; for Aristotle, in mentioning it, brings forward the apparently instantaneous transmission of daylight. This notion was disputed by Alhazen, in his Treatise on Optics, but only by meta-physical weapons, which were again opposed by several very worthless arguments, by his commentator, Porta, although he admitted the immateriality of light. Galileo seems to have been the first amongst modern philoso