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| Preface to the First Edition | |
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| Preface to the Second Edition | |
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| Acknowledgementsxiii | |
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| Introducing Light | |
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| The perception of light through the ages | |
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| Colours | |
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| Measuring the speed of light | |
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| The process of vision | |
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| The nature of light | |
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| The birth of quantum mechanics | |
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| Light as a Ray: Reflection | |
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| Fermat's principle | |
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| Mirrors | |
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| A historical interlude: Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) | |
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| Light as a Ray: Refraction | |
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| Refraction | |
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| Lenses | |
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| Objects and images: converging lenses | |
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| Objects and images: diverging lenses | |
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| Lens combinations | |
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| The eye | |
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| Making visible what the eye cannot see | |
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| Combinations of lenses | |
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| A final note on Fermat's principle | |
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| Light from Afar - Astronomy | |
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| The earth | |
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| The moon | |
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| Sizes and distances | |
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| The planets | |
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| The Copernican revolution | |
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| After Copernicus | |
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| The solar system in perspective | |
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| A historical interlude: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) | |
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| Light from the Past - Astrophysics | |
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| The birth of astrophysics | |
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| The methods of astrophysics | |
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| Other stars and their 'solar systems' | |
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| Reconstructing the past | |
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| The life and death of a star | |
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| A historical interlude: Isaac Newton (1642-1727) | |
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| Introducing Waves | |
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| Waves - the basic means of communication | |
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| The mathematics of a travelling wave | |
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| The superposition of waves | |
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| Forced oscillations and resonance | |
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| Natural frequencies of vibration and resonance | |
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| Diffraction - waves can bend around corners | |
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| The magic of sine and the simplicity of nature | |
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| A historical interlude: Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) | |
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| Sound Waves | |
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| Sound and hearing | |
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| Sound as a tool | |
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| The superposition of sound waves | |
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| Sound intensity | |
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| Other sensations | |
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| Strings and pipes in music | |
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| The Doppler effect | |
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| A historical interlude: The sound barrier | |
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| Light as a Wave | |
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| Light as a wave | |
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| Wave properties which do not make reference to a medium | |
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| Specifically light | |
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| Is there a limit to what we can distinguish? | |
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| Other electromagnetic waves | |
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| Light from two sources | |
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| Thin films | |
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| Diffraction gratings | |
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| Other 'lights' | |
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| Coherence | |
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| Polarization | |
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| A historical interlude: Thomas Young (1773-1829) | |
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| Making Images | |
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| Creating images | |
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| Holography | |
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| There Was Electricity, There Was Magnetism, and Then There Was Light… | |
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| The mystery of 'action at a distance' | |
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| 'Fields of force' | |
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| Magnetism | |
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| Electrodynamics | |
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| Getting electric charges to move with the help of magnetism | |
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| Maxwell's synthesis | |
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| Then there was light | |
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| A historical interlude: James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) | |
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| 'Atoms of Light' - The Birth of Quantum Theory | |
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| Emission of energy by radiation | |
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| Classical theories of blackbody radiation | |
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| Max Planck enters the scene | |
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| Planck's 'act of despair' | |
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| A historical interlude: Max Planck (1858-1947) | |
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| The Development of Quantum Mechanics | |
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| The development of quantum mechanics | |
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| Matrix mechanics | |
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| Order does matter | |
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| Wave mechanics | |
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| Generalized quantum mechanics | |
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| Quantum reality | |
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| A historical interlude: Niels Bohr (1885-1962) | |
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| Atoms of Light Acting as Particles | |
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| The photoelectric effect | |
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| The Compton effect - more evidence for the particle nature of light | |
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| A historical interlude: Robert A. Millikan (1868-1953) | |
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| Atoms of Light Behaving as Waves | |
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| Photons one at a time | |
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| Feynman's 'strange theory of the photon' | |
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| A historical interlude: Richard Feynman (1918-1988) | |
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| Relativity: Part 1: How It Began | |
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| Space and time | |
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| 'Dogmatic rigidity' | |
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| Looking for the ether | |
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| Symmetry | |
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| The special theory of relativity | |
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| Pythagoras re-visited | |
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| The fourth dimension | |
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| A philosophical interlude | |
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| A historical interlude: Hendrik A. Lorentz (1853-1928) | |
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| Relativity: Part 2: Verifiable Predictions | |
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| Time dilation | |
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| Bringing energy into the picture | |
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| The steps from symmetry to nuclear energy | |
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| A historical interlude: Albert Einstein (1879-1955) | |
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| The Road to 'Heavy Light' | |
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| Making matter out of energy | |
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| A unified theory of weak and electromagnetic forces | |
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| Index | |
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| About the Authors | |