Elaheh Kheirandish, dissertation student; Dissertation, "The Arabic Tradition of Euclid's Optics" On the first day, according to the traditional story of creation, "God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness." This passage from Genesis demonstrates the importance which light has traditionally held for our understanding of the world. Even in the modern world, optics, the scientific study of light, has played a central role in the development of science: from Kepler, Huygens and Newton in the 17th century who argued over the nature of light, to Maxwell and Faraday in the 19th century who showed that light is an electro-magnetic phenomenon, to the founders of quantum theory in the early 20th century who argued that light is both a wave and a particle, to current workers in unified field theories who try to account for the behavior of light photons. Given the centrality of the study of light in the history of science, it is important to have an understanding of the way it has been treated by science throughout history. Such studies not only show how science developed but also provides insights into a culture as it shows how these cultures which examined light treated this central phenomenon. A major lacuna in the history of the study of light, however, is in the transition from ancient Greek optics to the medieval world view. Ms. Kheirandish's dissertation promises to fill this void and to provide the kind of insights which we need to understand how the scientists in the Arabic world thought of light. Specifically, Mr. Kheirandish is looking at the Arabic treatment of the foremost text in the science of light, Euclid's Optics. Euclid's work used a geometrical approach to the study of vision and was first translated into Arabic in the 9th century. Ms. Kheirandish will examine this early version and examine how this optical tradition developed up to the 13th century. This study requires travel to archives in Europe and the Orient in order to examine the remaining copies of these Arabic treatments of optics. This grant provides Ms. Kheirandish with the travel support to these archives.
