Excerpt from Optical Theories: Based on Lectures Delivered Before the Calcutta University
In the year 1912, the University of Calcutta appointed me Reader in Physics and invited me to deliver a course of lectures to its advanced students on Optical Theories, one of the conditions of the appointment being that the lectures should be published after their delivery. The lectures were actually delivered during the months of February and March, 1912, but pressure of other work has prevented me, till now, from seeing them through the press.
It has been my object in these lectures to trace the development of Optical Theories from the earliest times to the present day. I have tried to understand and help others (so far as I can) to understand the relation between the different theories, so that one may be clear as to how much is certainly known and how much is mere speculation. In the midst of the bewildering mass of investigations that a student of luminiferous medium is confronted with at the present day, a sketch, such as the one attempted here, describing, with such details as will make the general argument intelligible, how we have been led up to the present position and what that position really is should, as it seems to me, be of considerable use. How far I have succeeded in my attempt, it is for others to judge.
To the latest developments of the optical theory including the theory of relativity, no reference has been made here. I hope to deal with them in a later volume, if the present attempt proves successful.
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