This chapter investigates the role of optical technology in the literature of the late Early Modern period. It focuses primarily on literary engagement with the telescope, invented in the early seventeenth century in the Netherlands. In exploring representations of telescopes and optical technology in Early Modern literary, this chapter explores the duality by which, on the one hand, such technologies promised the godlike ability to make the unseen seen and the unknowable known; yet, on the other, allowed for the creation of seemingly miraculous mirages, illusions, and visual tricks. Herman argues that the lesson of works such as Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon is that we must remain skeptical of the notion that any technology can relieve us of the burden of sustained critical engagement. “The telescope does not automatically reveal the truth,” Herman concludes: “The image it presents must be interpreted.”

Vision science combines ideas from physics, biology, and psychology. The language and ideas of mathematics help scientists communicate and provide an initial framing for understanding the visual system. Mathematics combined with computational modeling adds important realism to the formulations. Together, mathematics and computational tools provide a realistic estimate of the initial signals the brain analyzes to render visual judgments (e.g., motion, depth, and color). This chapter first traces calculations from the representation of the light signal, to how that signal is transformed by the lens to the retinal image, and then how the image is converted into cone photoreceptor excitations. The central steps in the initial encoding rely heavily on linear systems theory and the mathematics of signal-dependent noise. We then describe computational methods that add more realism to the description of how light is encoded by cone excitations. Finally, we describe the mathematical formulation of the ideal observer using all the encoded information to perform a visual discrimination task, and Bayesian methods that combine prior information and sensory data to estimate the light input. These tools help us reason about the information present in the neural representation, what information is lost, and types of neural circuits for extracting information.

Elena Fratto examines Chekhov’s interests in the scientific advancements of his time, showing how his passion for horticulture, his knowledge of botany, and his interests in astronomy, optics, thermodynamics, and evolutionary and degenerative theory transferred directly to his fiction.

The physics chapter by Klaus Wendt, Andreas Pysik and Johannes Lhotzky aims at promoting deeper understanding of the complex phenomenon of the rainbow and encourages learners to demonstrate and share their understanding through a Wikipedia article. In this deeper learning episode, learners carry out a number of experiments on spectral colours and colour sequences. They organise the information gathered and explain the physics concepts and processes underlying the phenomenon. The authors use innovative ways of scaffolding academic language development to increase the meaning-making potential of younger learners.

Why would a fourth-century BC Atomist – Anaxarchus – express his scepticism about knowing the truth of things by imaging these as scene-painting? The comparison seems already to have been made by Democritus and Anaxagoras, who according to Vitruvius had been impressed by something an Athenian painter named Agatharchus had written on perspective. This chapter offers a detailed scrutiny of a range of texts that have a bearing on the interpretation of Vitruvius’ claim. It argues that Agatharchus was probably author of a pioneering treatise on stage-building, which included a section on scene-painting lauding its power to create the illusion of a whole three-dimensional world. Anaxagoras will have taken this claim as cue for his dictum: ‘Appearances are a sight of things unseen’ – in the sense that there is no break between the macroscopic world of ordinary observation and the microscopic world which explains it. The Atomist Democritus will no doubt have imparted a quite different spin to Anaxagoras’ slogan in praising it. But it is unlikely that either Presocratic was prompted to a mathematical interest in perspective by reading Agatharchus. It is only with the Hellenistic philosophers, and especially Epicurus, that optics begins to leave its trace on general epistemology.

This paper is detective work. I aim to show that the brilliant Pythagorean mathematician Archytas of Tarentum was the founder of ancient Greek mathematical optics. The evidence is indirect. (1) A fragment of Aristotle preserved in Iamblichus is one of two doxographical notices to mention Pythagorean work in optics. (2) Apuleius credits Archytas with a theory of visual rays which saves the principle that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. I argue that the source from which Apuleius got this information was the Catoptrics of Archimedes, the genuineness of which I defend against Knorr’s hypothesis that it is the Euclidean Catoptrics, which had been misattributed to Archimedes. (3) The omission of optics from the mathematical curriculum in Plato’s Republic, and the Timaeus’ wholly physical account of mirror images, can be explained as polemical, for it is well attested that optics was practised in the Academy. The reason Plato does not mention optics is that he objected to Archytas using mathematics to understand the physical world rather than to transcend it.

This chapter focusses on the famous queries appended to the Latin Optice, in which Newton made some notorious – but also very ambiguous – statements about space being akin to the divine sensorium. Many commentators have speculated about how this implied a metaphysics of divine omnipresence. It is shown that this was not the case – rather, Newton was developing the anti-metaphysical analogical natural theology he had first conceived in the 1690s. But now, his argument took on a new, polemically anti-Cartesian dimension. This was the result of the influence on him of some of his followers, above all Samuel Clare, the translator of the English Opticks. Indeed, there is very strong circumstantial evidence that Clarke was actively involved in the composition of the new material in the Optice queries, or at least their natural-theological material. That material also owed a debt to another early Newtonian, the Scottish physician George Cheyne.

Historiography concerning the relationship (or non-relationship) between magic (or the “occult”) and “science” was dominated in the 1960s-1980s by the “Hermetic” thesis of Frances Yates and its critics (including Robert Westman and Brian Vickers). Vickers in particular argued that the “occult” and the “scientific” are separate “mentalities” or paradigms. This chapter considers an alternative view. By tracing the fortunes of the theory of radiative virtue advanced by the ninth-century Arabic philosopher al-Kindi, which began as a “theory of the magical arts” providing a physical basis for magical operations, we can see that some “magical” ideas connected with the astrological theory of “celestial virtues” influenced later natural philosophy. Al-Kindi’s suggestion that all causation in the elemental world was effected by means of rays was taken up in the medieval perspectiva tradition, and elaborated into a theory of astral magic by John Dee, but continued to provide a model for action at a distance in the mechanist theories of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, such as Kenelm Digby, Walter Charleton, and—ultimately—Isaac Newton, who believed that the corpuscles of all bodies acted at a distance by “certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces” in a similar way to the rays of light.